Immigration from Vietnam: statistics

Our purpose is to define the origin of Canada's Vietnamese community in numbers.

Number do not tell the whole story and we follow this article with several others that provide other necessary information.

Let's start with the numbers.

Our best numbers

Here we lay it all out in a table with copious footnotes.

The Canadian programs are highlighted in colours corresponding to those used in the pie chart in The origins of Canada's Vietnamese community.

Table: Immigration from Vietnam

Group	When and How Many	Origins of Those Who Entered Canada
Students and pre-1975 immigrants	under 3,000 by 1975	Mostly students and visitors in Quebec.
Fall of Saigon^[11]	1975-77: 4,781 ^[2]	In 1975 the students and visitors in Quebec were invited to stay in Canada and allowed to bring their relatives to Canada. ^[1] Canada was not involved with the evacuation at the fall of Saigon.^[3] Under US pressure, Canada committed to take in 2,000 from US evacuation camps and 1,000 from refugee camps in southeast Asia. Canada gave first priority to finding families of Canadians in those camps.
First boat people	1978: 659	This figure includes 604 from the Hai Hong incident in November, 1978. The event marked the beginning of the ethnic Chinese exodus and Canada's recognition of the boat people crisis.
UNHCR Programs (Boat People Crisis)^[4]	1979-96: 165,000, from all over Vietnam^[5]	The number of people leaving Vietnam exploded in late 1978 when ethnic Chinese from all over Vietnam began leaving. About one third arrived through the ODP, that is, they did not leave by boat.^[6]
Regular Immigration Programs	1997-2019: around 47,000	Immigrants coming to Canada under regular immigration policies.
Harper's "victims of the fall of Saigon"^[7]	2008-2015: a few hundred in series of small groups	People who, 40 years later, were still trying to stake a claim to refugee status as "victims of the fall of Saigon". They provided Harper with an opportunity to do what he thought Canada should have done in 1975.

Sources:

For 1975 to 1980: Minister of Immigration Lloyd Axworthy's report to the legislature (Canada Immigration 1982).^[10]^[11]

For 1981 to 1997: UNHCR via Robinson's Terms of Refuge (Robinson, 1998).^[193]

Cross checked with immigration statistics available on Government of Canada web sites:

1973-1996 (Canada LAC).^[99]

1998-2012 (Canada.ca, 2013).^[392]

2013-2014 (Canada.ca, 2015).^[393]

2015-2019 (Canada.ca, 2020).^[391]

Interpretation issues

In recent years people have been 'adjusting' the way these numbers are reported to suit political agendas. Here is how we dealt with some reporting issues.

In 2008 the Harper government began to adopt the fiction that Canada had been an ally of the Saigon regime. In this alternate world, it is necessary to believe that Canada admitted refugees from Vietnam because they were victims of the fall of Saigon.^[9] The numbers, when interpreted correctly, do not support that hypothesis. Neither do any other parts of the story.

Our agenda here is to find the original sources of information and report it in the context of the decisions as they were made at the time, not in terms of how people want them to be perceived today.

Here are common issues that are raised today about the numbers and how we resolved them:

The term 'refugee' has a flexible meaning. In particular, people can simply self identify as a 'refugee' and many do. During the "boat people" program, Canada did not apply any formal "refugee" criteria to the selection of people to admit until very near the end of the program. We are therefore justified in avoiding the whole issue by reporting total immigration figures. In any case, inconsistencies in government reporting over the years make that the only practical course.
Similarly, the term "boat person" has acquired a fuzzy meaning because of self-identification and historical revisionism. The term correctly refers to the people admitted under the terms of a UNHCR program that ran from 1979 to 1996. Both Canada and the US used this terminology, Conversely, the large number admitted to the US and the small number admitted to Canada before 1978 were not called boat people. Applying the name to earlier departures is a practice adopted by revisionists.

The boat people did not necessarily leave Vietnam by boat. The ODP (orderly departure program) was part of this UNHCR program. Canada used the ODP for family reunifications and by the end of the program there were substantial numbers. They are still counted as "boat people" because it was part of the UNHHCR program.
There were concurrent humanitarian crises in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Canada and UNHCR dealt with all of them under the heading of "Southeast Asian Refugees". UNHCR reports sometimes group the numbers and some authors have failed to separate them when talking about Vietnam. We have broken out the numbers so that our numbers only include people from Vietnam. Over the course of the whole SE Asian program, about 70% were from Vietnam.

Ethnicity of the refugees, however, is another matter. The fact that most of the refugees from Vietnam were ethnic Chinese is a fact often overlooked because it reveals the true causes of the refugee crisis. Original sources do not report ethnicity and so neither do we.
The government often made public commitments as to how many refugees would be admitted. Those commitments were not necessarily fulfilled. Furthermore, commitments varied as to whether or not they included private sponsorships. We ignore commitments completely and report the actual total number of admissions, government and private.
Some reporters talk about "waves" of refugees. That is an American concept. Canada did not have "waves" of refugees. The Americans referred to the victims of the fall of Saigon as the first wave and the boat people as the second wave. Canada had only the boat people.
Place of origin. Canada did not record what part of Vietnam the boat people came from. They definitely came from all over Vietnam and some authors make a case that most of Canada's came from the north. There are many anecdotal reports of many Canadians from Hai Phong. This topic has been made controversial today because of the government's attempts to claim that all the refugees were "victims of the fall of Saigon". There are no breakdowns by place of origin.
There are Canadians of Vietnamese origin who, like Senator Thanh Hai Ngo, were members of the French-educated Saigon elite. These people can legitimately claim to be “victims of the fall of Saigon” in the sense that the event caused them to lose their wealth and status. That's not the reason they got into Canada -- Saigon elite were neither sought nor rejected as candidates in Canada's immigration programs. Their presence in Canada is nevertheless a hook for the historical revisionists to hang their story on. These people are often featured in stories as “representative Vietnamese refugees”. As the numbers show, they are not representative.

Footnotes:

¹Canada made a sustained effort to find the relatives, both through contacts with the Vietnam government and through the US and other refugee camps. We have found no record of how many were actually found but is is quite probable that, in the long run, most of them were found because family reunification has been a constant priority in Canadian immigrations programs, and this was observed throughout the events in SE Asia.

²This is a controversial figure because of the modern-day political assertions that Canada did respond to the fall of Saigon. Some sources put this number as high as 9,000 (even if that number were true, that would not represent a particularly strong response to the fall of Saigon -- thus demonstrating how futile the political effort is). We have gone to original immigration department statistics for our number. We believe the some of the higher numbers may reflect political commitments made that were not necessarily fulfilled.

Immigration statistics in those days were not broken down in ways that might be useful for analysis today. This figure would include the family reunifications, and sources disagree on the proportion, but contemporary estimates range from two-thirds of them to all of them.

Canada did commit to the US that Canada would take 3,000 refugees from the US camps, but we have found no record of to what degree that commitment was fulfilled or how much of it was fulfilled by relatives of Canadians. Canada did for years later regret this commitment -- look up the story of General Quang on the internet.

³ Prior to May 1 there was no initiative to admit evacuees from Saigon, other than the relatives mentioned above. Aldeman reported: "… there is no evidence that anti-communism was a motivating factor in the acceptance of a small number of Indochinese refugees in 1975. Indeed. It appeared that Canada did not wish to become too closely involved in a situation which was interpreted as bring the result of American involvement in the Vietnam war." (Adelman, 1982, p. 37)^[212]

The definitive cabinet decision on refugees from the fall of Saigon was made May 1, 1975 (Canada LAC, 1975)^[48]. Leading up to that, the government had consistently signaled that it was not going to respond to the fall of Saigon -- see examples in (Canada HC Debates, 2016-05-01)^[97], (Canada HC Debates, 1975-04-28)^[95], (Canada HC Debates, 1975-04-24)^[92].

Although the May 1 quota was moved around between different programs, there is no evidence that anything was added to it until 1978.

⁴Some sources divide the 'boat people' crisis up and report the numbers in different groupings. We have found no solid basis for any of these groupings and suspect that some of them are related to the political agendas mentioned in our notes about controversies. Specifically, people try to find a dividing line where they can say that those "before" were a response to the fall of Saigon, and those "after" were probably "communists".

Our basis for delimiting the boat people crisis is UNHCR involvement. The UNHCR declared a crisis in 1979 and declared it over in 1996. Canada got involved because UNHCR did.

⁵Read about Canada's non-partisan approach to selecting immigrants: Canada and the boat people crisis.

As Aldeman explains, Canada's selection was heavily weighted toward taking people from the north: “As the US would not consider taking any refugees from North Vietnam, Canada took a disproportionate share of them” (Adelman, 1982, p. 47)^[212]

⁶The ODP (Orderly Departure Program) was one of the UNHCR's "subprograms" within the overall refugee program. The ODP was conceived as a way to accept people directly from Vietnam without their having to leave by boat. The ODP began receiving applications in 1979, but not many people actually moved until after 1981. People nevertheless continued to leave by boat because the program was able to handle only a relatively small number of cases. About one third of the Canadian arrivals came through the ODP. The US maintained its ODP program for long after the UNHCR declared the refugee crisis resolved.

⁷Harper was so determined to prove that Canada rescued the former Saigon elite that he went looking for more (with the help of certain groups in Canada). A problem Harper had was that anyone who wanted to leave Vietnam today could just buy an air ticket. Harper had to go to Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines to find Vietnamese "refugees". Further information in The Vietnamese refugees of 2015.

⁹ Read more about what Harper did in the the Government section of this web site.

¹⁰We deal with causes in Canada and the boat people crisis

¹¹ People admitted during this period of time were NOT called boat people, in Canada or US.

References:

These are references to the bibliography that appear in the above text. Click or touch the superscripted number for more information about the source (opens new tab).

Adelman, H. (1982) Canada and the Indochinese Refugees Regina: L.A. Weigl Educational Associates Ltd. ^[212]

Canada HoC Debates. (1975-04-24). Session 30-1 V5 p. 5158. Question period: Inquiry whether Vietnamese given refuge status. Available at: this link (Accessed: 2016-09-01). ^[92]

Canada HoC Debates. (1975-04-28). Session 30-1 v5 p. 5243. Question period: … the desire of some Vietnamese to come to Canada. Available at: this link (Accessed 2016-09-01) ^[95]

Canada HoC Debates. (1975-05-01). Session 30-1 v5 p. 5365. Question period: Possibility of Vietnamese being declared international refugees. Available at: this link (Accessed: 2016-09-01). ^[97]

Canada LAC. (1975). [Cabinet Conclusions]. 'Refugees from Cambodia and South Vietnam' Library and Archives Canada, Item 40647 1975-05-01. Available at: this link (Accessed: 2023-09-02). ^[48]

Canada. Immigration. (1982). Indochinese Refugees: The Canadian Response 1979-1980 - Statistics. Available at: this link (Accessed 2016-02-01). ^[10]

Canada. Immigration. (1982). Indochinese Refugees: The Canadian Response 1979-1980 Available at: this link (Accessed 2016-02-01). ^[11]

Canada. LAC. (Various dates) Immigration Department Statistics 1966-1996 Available at: this link (Accessed 2016-08-24). ^[99]

Canada.ca. (2013-04-03). Facts and figures, immigrant overview permanent residents. 2013, 2014. Available at: this link (Accessed 2020-08-06) ^[393]

Canada.ca. (2020-05). Canada - Admissions of Permanent Residents by Country of Citizenship, January 2015 - May 2020 Available at: this link (Accessed 2020-08-06). ^[391]

Publications Canada. (2013). Facts and figures, immigration overview. 1998-2012. Available at: this link (Accessed: 2020-08-06). ^[392]

12 references.

For a complete bibliography see A Boat People reading list for Canada and A data base of historical resources.

BoatPeople.ca

Người Canada Gốc Việt: A History of the Vietnamese in Canada

Immigration statistics

How many came to Canada from Vietnam?

Our best numbers

Table: Immigration from Vietnam

Interpretation issues