The best books on U.S. refugee policy

The United States was conceived as a place of refuge, and the nation has accommodated many different types of refugees since its founding. Despite these ideological origins, a distinct and permanent track for refugee admissions within the immigration bureaucracy was not institutionalized until the Cold War. 

Bon Tempo examines the reasons why this distinct track emerged during the late 1940s, how the track evolved over the next forty years, and how the track was used to accommodate millions of people fleeing communism during the Cold War. By the end of the Cold War, US refugee policy had become intertwined with Cold War foreign policy, and the term “refugee” had become synonymous with anti-communism.

Espiritu’s book is a foundational text in critical refugee studies, an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry that underscores the agency and resilience of refugees rather than their status as objects of rescue.

Histories of refugee policy often downplay the role resettlement nations have played in the displacement of the populations they resettle. Espiritu reminds us that US militarism in southeast Asia contributed to the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were then forced to seek refuge in the United States and its territories. Their “rescue” cannot ever legitimize or justify the militarism that produced their displacement.

Espiritu’s examination of Vietnamese displacement is especially important for its discussion of the politics of memory and the commemoration of the Vietnam War.

The recent arrival of unaccompanied minors at US ports of entry is not a new phenomenon. In this book, Anita Casavantes Bradford examines the history of child migration to the United States since World War II.

Readers learn about the foreign policy, domestic, and humanitarian concerns that shaped U.S. policies towards unaccompanied minors; the governmental and nongovernmental actors who advocated on children’s behalf; and the emerging notions of children’s rights in U.S. society that contributed to the often-heated debates on immigration policy. She provides a much-needed historical context for understanding the challenges child migration poses today.

Laura Madokoro offers a fascinating discussion of Chinese refugees during the Cold War as they sought protection in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. These historically white settler societies had long restricted or barred Chinese migration for racist reasons, so the accommodation of Chinese refugees fleeing war and persecution was never guaranteed. Indeed, even their refugee status was questioned.

The book examines the governmental, humanitarian, and faith-based actors who shaped national responses to this migration and, ultimately, determined the fates of millions of displaced people.

Jana Lipman examines the Vietnamese refugee camps in Guam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Hong Kong in the decades after the fall of Saigon. She asks us to consider how camps function as liminal social and legal spaces where refugees forfeit rights with the hope of eventually securing membership (and rights) in a resettlement society. It is in the camps that refugees try to prove their ‘worthiness’ for admission to society, and where they navigate a cumbersome—and often hostile—bureaucracy that ignores their humanity, often with dire consequences. 

The book examines the implementation of refugee policy at the local level by local actors, as well as the role of Vietnamese activism—in the camps and in the diaspora—in asserting refugee rights.