1975 / After the fall of Saigon in the spring, some 137,000 Vietnamese deemed at risk were they to stay in Vietnam after the takeover by North Vietnamese Communist troops are admitted to the U.S. as refugees.
1978-86 / Some 2,000,000 "boat people" leave Vietnam at incredible risk (at least
half a million are lost at sea) to seek freedom, reversing world opinion about the true
nature of Vietnamese communism at home. Of these, about 850,000 are admitted to the U.S.
1978-89 / Vietnam signs 25-year friendship treaty with Moscow and invades Cambodia, causing much of the world to turn against it. Ten years later the venture ends in failure (at a cost of 60,000 lives) and Vietnam has to withdraw its troops.
1985 / Nguyen Xuan Vinh, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan, teaches his 1,000th student. He received the first doctorate ever conferred in his field by the University of Colorado, in 1965.
1986 / The National Congress of Vietnamese in America (NCVA) is founded. Later, the organization, with offices in Washington DC, changes its name to National Congress of Vietnamese Americans.
1987 / Legislation is approved by the U.S. Congress to accept South Vietnamese refugees having spent more than three years in Communist re-education camps. (This leads to the so-called "H.O." Program, which resettles some 120,000 "political prisoners" and their families.)
1989 / The "first legislative victory" (New York Times) by Vietnamese Americans (the ten-year waiver of application of the Jones Act of 1789) is won by Vietnamese fishermen in the San Francisco Bay Area.
1990 / The Amerasian Homecoming Act eventually leads to the admission of some 30,000 Amerasians to the U.S., most of them with Vietnamese mothers and American serviceman fathers. The first Vietnamese American to hold public office is elected in Westminster, California (Tony Lam, to the City Council). Official U.S. Census figures report Vietnamese- American population at 900,000.
1991 / Nguyen Ngoc Bich is appointed Deputy Director (later Acting Director), OBEMLA, U.S.
Department of Education. He is followed, under the Clinton administration, by Dang Pham. Mary Chi Ray is appointed Deputy Director, ORR, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Later, Nguyen Van Hanh is appointed Director of ORR.
1995 / The Radio Free Asia Bill is approved by Congress, leading to the creation of the Vietnamese Service, which airs its first broadcasts to Vietnam on the eve of Tet (February 5, 1997).
2000 / Official U.S. Census figures put Vietnamese- American population at 1.2 million (fifth largest Asian-American population).
2001 / Viet Dinh, credited with crafting the Patriot Act, is appointed Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. Later, Mina Nguyen is appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury.
2002 / The first Vietnamese American, Van Tran, a Republican, is elected to the California Legislature. A year later, Hubert Vo, a Democrat, becomes the first Vietnamese American elected to the Texas Legislature.
2003-07 / The first Vietnam Human Rights Bill passes the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly. In 2005, another is passed nearly unanimously. Both bills are killed in committee when they reach the Senate. In 2007, the Vietnam Human Rights Bill (HR 3096) is approved in the House by a vote of 413-4, and this time it has a good chance of being submitted to a plenary vote in the Senate.
2004 / Betty Nguyen, who was a little girl when her family fled Vietnam in 1975, becomes a television news anchor on the Cable News Network (CNN). The Emmy Award winner received her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in broadcast journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
2007 / Vietnamese-American population is put at 1.5 million (fourth largest Asian-American population). Remittances back to Vietnam by Vietnamese Americans are estimated at around $3 billion a year.