This article is an introduction to the origins of Canada's Vietnamese community. The articles that follow go more deeply into the explanations of why and how events unfolded.
Vietnamese immigration to Canada:
The full circle represents 220,000 people, the number of Vietnamese admitted to Canada up to 2019.
Three distinct periods of immigration
Canada has had three distinct periods of immigration that account for all of today's first-generation Vietnamese community in Canada.
Up to 1978 - about 4% of the total.[1] The first Vietnamese in Canada were mostly students who had come to Quebec to study. When Saigon fell in 1975, they were invited to stay in Canada and attempts were made to get their families into Canada. Some were found is the US refugee camps or other refugee camps, and some came directly from Vietnam.
Other than retrieving these families, Canada did not participate in the evacuation at the fall of Saigon as the event was not considered an international refugee crisis. Canada considered it to be a US problem and did not want to get involved. People leaving Vietnam in this period were not referred to as "boat people" in either the US or Canada. [2]
1979-1996 - about 75% of the total. The largest number of Vietnamese were admitted in a UNHCR program formally known as the "SE Asian Refugee Crisis", but more popularly known as the "boat people" crisis. The Vietnamese part was was precipitated by a conflict between Vietnam and China. The majority of these people were ethnic Chinese and they came from all over Vietnam.
While our numbers here include only those from Vietnam, it should be noted that 30% of Canada's refugees in this period were from Cambodia and Laos (not included in the chart). The boat people crisis was a humanitarian response to a broad humanitarian problem, not a response political events in Vietnam.
Although the program is loosely referred to as the "boat people" crisis, not all the participants left by boat and may not consider themselves to be "boat people". Many, particularly those with family in Canada, were able to fly directly from Vietnam and others took an overland route via Thailand. These were all part of the UNHCR program which had the overall goal of eliminating the offshore refugee camps.
After 1997 - about 21% of total immigration as of 2019. Canada continues to admit Vietnamese under normal immigration programs, which place heavy emphasis on family reunification and skilled workers. Our numbers here include only immigration for permanent residency. By this time most of the growth in the community would be from second and third generations born in Canada, and there are also thousands coming on a temporary basis as students or workers.
Canada's non-partisan immigration policy
Canada did not qualify any prospective immigrants from Vietnam on the basis of their role in any of Vietnam's past conflicts.
Although Canada worked with UNHCR during the boat people crisis, UNHCR's technical description of "refugee" was not applied by either Canada or the UNHCR as a necessary qualification until very near the end of the program. The main goal of the program was to empty existing refugee camps in SE Asia, not to "rescue" people from a political or life-threatening situation in Vietnam. This means that people who identify as a "refugee" are choosing to do so, often for political reasons. For most the term does not describe the technical circumstances of their admission to Canada.
Canada's selection policy was entirely non-partisan in that no one was asked what they had been doing prior to 1975.[3] Throughout all of these years, immigrants were accepted from all over Vietnam largely on the basis of Canada's normal immigration policy, which emphasized families and ability to integrate into Canadian society.
As a result of these policies the boat people came to Canada from all over Vietnam with many different experiences of Vietnam's past conflicts. It is often the case that Vietnamese families were divided over those conflicts.
Today most people respect those differences and treat them as irrelevant to life in Canada. Old partisan differences are expressed only by a very small minority associated with the former Saigon political and military elite. In our view, Canada has a moral obligation to the boat people to remain officially non-partisan with respect to Vietnam's conflicts.[4]
Canada's response to events in Vietnam was very different from the US response and the two should not be confused. Most of the American program was partisan in nature. The different responses resulted in different Vietnamese communities.[5]
Canadians of Vietnamese origin today
The boat people were young and many now have two generations of descendants born in Canada.
We don't know how many Canadians of Vietnamese origin there are today because published census figures probably underestimate the number.
Census statistics are based on voluntarily declared ethnicity and mother tongue.
Although the former boat people generally identity as being of Vietnamese origin and can speak Vietnamese, for most neither their ethnicity nor their mother tongue is Vietnamese -- most are ethnic Chinese.[6]
By simply projecting average demographic figures, it would be plausible to assume that 160,000 original boat people have become well over 300,000 Canadians today. When you add in other Vietnamese immigrants, the total is likely over 400,000.