Vietnamese Americans

Demographics

The fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975 resulted in the exodus of thousands of Vietnamese refugees to the United States. In 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese refugees, primarily from South Vietnam, were resettled in the United States. A few thousand Vietnamese were admitted annually into the United States from 1976 to 1978. In 1979, the border war between China and Vietnam stimulated the acceptance of over 44,000 Vietnamese refugees by the United States. In 1980 and 1981 combined, over 180,000 Vietnamese refugees were admitted into the United States. The number dropped to 42,000 in 1982 and, with the exception of 1985, continued to exceed 20,000 each year through the mid-1990s. From 1989 through the mid-1990s, Amerasians (the children of Vietnamese mothers and American servicemen fathers) and former South Vietnamese prisoners of war, under the auspices of special refugee resettlement programs, constituted one-third to one-half of the Vietnamese refugees admitted into the United States. Since the mid-1990s, Vietnamese immigrants sponsored by family members in the United States have replaced refugees as the most significant portion of the arriving Vietnamese population.

The 1990 census enumerated 593,213 persons of Vietnamese origin residing in the United States. Ten years later, in 2000, U.S. census takers counted 1,122,528 Vietnamese, a near doubling of the population. The 2005 American Community Survey estimated the U.S. Vietnamese population at 1,418,334. This compares to an estimated population of Vietnam in 2007 of 85.1 million. While the refugee flow has largely ended since the mid-1990s, the Vietnamese population has continued to expand due to family reunion immigration and natural increase. According to 2000 census data, Vietnamese families were somewhat larger and younger than the United States population as a whole.

According to state estimates from the 2005 American Community Survey, the most sizable Vietnamese populations in the United States are in California (539, 150), Texas (159,107), Washington (60,543), Florida (55,555), Massachusetts (48,583), and Virginia (48,035). According to the 2000 census, among U.S. metropolitan areas, the largest Vietnamese communities are found in Los Angeles-Orange County-Riverside, California; San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, California; Houston-Galveston-Brazoria, Texas; Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas; the Washington, D.C., region; and Seattle-Tacoma-Bremerton, Washington.

Probably the most identifiable Vietnamese neighborhood in the United States is the Westminster area of Orange County, California, also known as “Little Saigon.” It has been estimated that more than 1,000 Vietnamese businesses and institutions surround Bolsa Avenue, the main intersection of Little Saigon. Westminster's Vietnamese community has attracted the ongoing attention of both the national media and social science scholars as a setting to investigate internal cohesion and divisions within an ethnic community as these emerge in relation to external community relationships with the government in Vietnam and other issues pertaining to social integration into U.S. society. Other U.S. cities with sizable Vietnamese business districts include Houston (Bellaire Avenue); Falls Church, Virginia, near Washington, D.C.; and Chicago (Argyle Street).

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