If the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia helped to shatter an already ailing anti-imperialist internationalism, a concomitant refugee crisis offered the rival vision of human rights internationalism a remarkable opportunity to fill the void. What remained of the anti-imperialist left contributed little to resolving the issue, yet the human rights internationalists stepped into the breach. Former French radicals turned humanitarians worked with Vietnamese refugees, Eastern European dissidents, and human rights groups such as Doctors Without Borders to organize a campaign against human rights violations in Vietnam. They chartered a hospital ship to rescue the refugees, which amounted to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation-state, showcasing a new kind of humanitarian interventionism. At the same time, they internationalized the campaign, even winning the support of the US government, which was only too happy to use the crisis to rewrite the history of the war, rebrand itself as a virtuous nation, and shine a harsh spotlight on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite efforts to deflect charges of rights violations, the SRV could do little to explain itself in the face of undeniable evidence of repression. If anti-imperialism helped secure their international victory in the 1960s, human rights sealed their defeat a decade later. The remaining radicals in the North Atlantic fought back but had little to offer as an alternative. With the core notions of the Leninist problematic in question, the radical left’s vision of internationalism lost its appeal, particularly among a new generation of activists looking for a way to do good in the world. And with anti-imperialism’s influence over the wider progressive milieu slipping, human rights internationalism made a giant leap in consolidating its hegemony, so much so that even some committed anti-imperialists ended up accepting its terms as the least bad option.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

During the late 1970s, US policymakers attempted to resume formal relations with China and Vietnam, respond to the Indochinese diaspora, and institutionalize human rights into US foreign policy. These efforts all became deeply enmeshed. Although attempts to normalize relations with Hanoi failed, they cast a long shadow. Thereafter, US policymakers demanded a withdrawal of Vietnamese troops from Cambodia and a “full accounting” of missing American servicemen were before Washington and Hanoi could resume official talks. These conditions tabled formal negotiations for nearly a decade.

Human rights and humanitarianism became increasingly entangled in this fluid environment. US policymakers described the Indochinese diaspora as both a human rights and humanitarian concern and implemented the Refugee Act of 1980, which codified a human rights definition of refugee with a humanitarian exception clause. The advocacy of the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees (CCIR), select congressmen, and growing Holocaust awareness helped solidify these connections in American thought and law. Nonexecutive actors also created significant momentum for expanded admission opportunities for Indochinese refugees. Because the White House remained preoccupied with other issues, the information, pressure, and publicity the CCIR and its governmental allies garnered were instrumental to creating a broad base of support for refugee admissions.

Between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s, more than one million Vietnamese “boat people” fled from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam by crossing the South China Sea. Some 700,000 were permanently resettled more than two dozen countries across the world. This essay compares the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in West Germany and the United States to illuminate similarities and differences in international and local responses to the influx of this refugee population within the context of the Cold War.Covering topics such as government responses, humanitarian interventions, public perception/reception, and refugee networks in the US and West Germany, the essay emphasizes connections overlooked in previous studies that examine Vietnamese boat people resettlement in only one national context.It underscores the multilateral impacts of the Vietnamese boat people exodus and its legacies in contemporary Germany and America.