The fall of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War as well as the most dramatic turning point in the history of the Vietnamese diaspora. From the mid 1970s and the early 1990s, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. Their lives were defined by concurrent and overlapping experiences of national loss, family separation, and difficulties among their loved ones in Vietnam amidst their own survival and adaptation in the new societies. They constructed their exilic identity through a host of media and built exilic communities through internal migration. Starting in the late 1980s, legal migration led tens of thousands of other Vietnamese to Little Saigon communities. In turn, they have enlarged the economic and political prowess of those communities, and helped to shift the collective experience from an exilic identity to a transnational identity.

As the Reagan administration reinvigorated the Cold War during its first term, US officials also expanded ongoing dialogue with Hanoi. This incongruity is explained by the fact that the issues American officials championed all painted vivid pictures of the evils of communism, including PO/MIA accounting and emigration programs for South Vietnamese, including Amerasians and former reeducation camp detainees. US officials described these causes as “humanitarian” causes.While discussions on “political” issues remained suspended, humanitarian concerns dominated the US-SRV agenda. US officials consistently earmarked more than 50% of annual refugee admissions slots for Indochinese throughout the 1980s.

Reagan’s celebration of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” and casting of the American soldier as a national hero reverberated widely. Veterans’ rising political capital opened even more space for members of Congress who had served in Vietnam to become some of the most prominent American voices in the US-SRV normalization process. At the same time, nonstate actors continued to play crucial roles. This chapter uses Ginetta Sagan’s Aurora Foundation to highlight the importance of NGO advocacy, the ongoing linkage between humanitarian and human rights rhetoric, and the ways gender dynamics played an important part in solidifying connections between nonexecutive actors.