Refugees, Children of

Refugee Waves

The resettlement of refugees in the United States can be dated from the period immediately following World War II. Between 1948 and the end of 1951, 409,696 Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians, and other individuals of mainly eastern European nationality arrived in the United States under the provisions of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Two years later, President Harry S. Truman's appeal to Congress to help escapees from the Communist countries of Eastern Europe led to the passage of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which authorized more than 200,000 new visas for eastern European refugees. After 1956, the U.S. government admitted more than 200,000 refugees from Hungary in the wake of the Soviet invasion of that country. These early refugees were similar in most respects to other immigrants and the numbers of refugees were still relatively small. Therefore, U.S. schools incorporated the children of refugees with relatively little difficulty and with few special programs.

After Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in January 1959, Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy established the Cuban Refugee Program. This program provided welfare benefits and assisted in the resettlement of Cuban refugees arriving along the Gulf Coast, primarily in southern Florida. In late 1962, the United States provided assistance to an army of Cuban exiles living in the United States that attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. After the failure of this invasion, more than 800,000 Cuban refugees were admitted to the United States, most of whom settled in southern Florida. The continuing streams of Cubans brought increasing numbers of Spanish-speaking students into public schools in Florida and in other locations and also led to the development of organizations aimed at assisting refugee families, most notably the refugee assistance offices created by U.S. Catholic Charities.

The largest wave of refugees came in the late 1970s to the beginning of 1990s. Refugees from the Southeast Asian nations of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos created new population groups in the United States and led to the sudden appearance of large numbers of children of Southeast Asian refugees in U.S. schools. Between 1975 and 2002, an estimated 1,146,150 refugees entered the United States from these three Southeast Asian nations. Most of them arrived before 1995.

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