To learn more about the effects of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese American immigration process, Cam Xuan Nguyen (Carrie) volunteered at the Vietnam Archive from October 31, 2008 to April 17, 2009. Carrie helped prepare the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association Collection files for digitization by numbering folders, removing corrosive materials, and providing help with Vietnamese to English translation.  In July, after receiving her J.D. in Business Law at Texas Tech, Ms. Nguyen took her  BAR exam with the goal of working in International Law. While awaiting the results Carrie decided to tour South America for 3 months, primarily Ecuador and Peru. The Vietnam Archive is happy to learn the exciting news that Ms. Nguyen passed the BAR. Congratulations Carrie!

UNHCR’s (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) ODP (Orderly Departure Program) was instituted at the first International conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva in May of 1979 (UN meeting on refugees and displaced persons in Southeast Asia) as a humanitarian endeavor in response to the high mortality of  “boat people” (Vietnamese refugees who fled Vietnam by boat after the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975).  Nearly 30 nations participated in ODP, allowing Vietnamese refugees to emigrate from Vietnam in a legal, safe, and orderly manner instead of risking their lives at sea.  The number of “boat people” who left Vietnam in the late ‘70’s and ‘80s is estimated from 1 to 2 million. No one knows the exact number of Vietnamese “boat people”, or how many of these refugees perished at sea or were killed by pirates. The ODP closed on September 30, 1994, however, on November 15, 2005 the U.S. and Vietnam signed an agreement resulting in the reopening of the ODP and the McCain Amendment (ammendment headed by John McCain which allowed the adult children of former Vietnamese reeducation camp detainees to immigrate to the U.S. along with their parents). The renewal of ODP ended on February 28, 2009 and the renewal of the McCain Amendment ended on September 30, 2009.

The Vietnam Center and Archive website has a new look.  The new version of our website features our new logo (designed by Misty Pollard of Texas Tech University’s Creative Services), colors inspired by the Texas Tech University Identity Guidelines, and numerous images from our archival collections.  In an effort to improve usablility of our site, we have added some new pages (such as online exhibits, subject guides, follow the VNCA, and information for researching onsite or online, among others), and reorganized some existing pages and locations.  Many of our most popular sections of the site, including the Virtual Archive and the Oral History Project, have the same URLs as before.  If you are unable to find the page you are looking for, try our Site Map.

(If you are a regular visitor to our website, the first time you visit the site, pages may look a little odd.  If this happens, it is because your browser is attempting to load an old stylesheet.  To correct this, hit the reload button in your browser, or hit F5 on your keyboard)

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at any time.