Hmong Americans
Hmong Americans are Americans of Hmong ancestry. Many Hmong Americans immigrated to the United States as refugees in the late 1970s, with a second wave in the 1980s and 1990s. Over half of the Hmong population from Laos left the country, or attempted to leave, in 1975, at the culmination of the Laotian Civil War.
During this period, thousands of Hmong were evacuated or escaped on their own to Hmong refugee camps in neighboring Thailand. About 90% of those who made it to refugee camps in Thailand were ultimately resettled in the United States. The rest, about 8 to 10%, resettled in countries including Canada, France, the Netherlands, and Australia.
According to the 2021 American Community Survey by the US Census Bureau, the population count for Hmong Americans was 368,609. As of 2019, the largest community in the United States was in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. Hmong Americans face disparities in healthcare, and socioeconomic challenges that lead to lower health literacy, median life expectancy, and per capita income.
History
1976 and 1980s
Initially, only 1,000 Hmong people were evacuated to the US. In May 1976, another 11,000 Hmong were allowed to enter the United States. By 1978 some 30,000 Hmong had immigrated to the US and by 1998, there were 200,000 Hmong living in the US. This first wave was made up primarily of men directly associated with General Vang Pao's Secret Army, which had been aligned with US war efforts during the Vietnam War. Vang Pao's Secret Army, which was subsidized by the US Central Intelligence Agency, fought mostly along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where his forces sought to disrupt North Vietnamese weapons supply efforts to the communist Viet Cong rebel forces in South Vietnam. Ethnic Laotian and Hmong veterans, and their families, led by Colonel Wangyee Vang formed the Lao Veterans of America in the aftermath of the war to help refugees in the camps in Thailand and to help former veterans and their families in the United States, especially with family reunification and resettlement issues.The passage of the Refugee Act of 1980 represented the second-wave of Hmong immigration. The clans, from which the Hmong take their surnames, are: Chang or Cha, Chao, Cheng, Chue, Fang or Fa, Hang or Ha, Her, Khang or Kha, Kong or Soung, Kue, Lee, Lor, Moua, Pha, Thao, Vang or Va, Vue or Vu, Xiong and Yang or Ya.
1990s and 2000s
Following the 1980 immigration wave, a heated global political debate developed over how to deal with the remaining Hmong refugees in Thailand. Many had been held in squalid Thai refugee camps, and the United Nations and the Clinton administration sought to repatriate them to Laos.Reports of human rights violations against the Hmong in Laos, including killings and imprisonments, led most Thailand-based Hmong to oppose returning there, even as the conditions worsened of the camps in Thailand, because of their lack of sufficient funding.
One of the more prominent examples of apparent Laotian abuse of the Hmong was the fate of Vue Mai, a former soldier. The US Embassy in Bangkok recruited him to return to Laos under the repatriation program, in their effort to reassure the Thai-based Hmong that their safety in Laos would be assured. But Vue disappeared in Vientiane. The US Commission for Refugees later reported that he was arrested by Lao security forces and never seen again.
Especially following the Vue Mai incident, the Clinton and UN policy of returning the Hmong to Laos began to meet with strong political opposition by US conservatives and some human rights advocates. Michael Johns, a former White House aide to George H. W. Bush and a Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst, along with other influential conservatives, led a campaign to grant the Thai-based Hmong immediate US immigration rights. In an October 1995 National Review article, citing the Hmong's contributions to US war efforts during the Vietnam War, Johns described Clinton's support for returning the Thai-based Hmong refugees to Laos as a "betrayal" and urged Congressional Republicans to step up opposition to the repatriation. Opposition to the repatriation grew in Congress and among Hmong families in the US. Congressional Republicans responded by introducing and passing legislation to appropriate sufficient funds to resettle all remaining Hmong in Thailand in the United States. Clinton vowed to veto the legislation.
In addition to internal US opposition to the repatriation, the government of Laos expressed reservations about the repatriation, stating that the Hmong remaining in Thailand were a threat to its one-party communist government and the Marxist government in Vientiane, Laos. In a significant and unforeseen political victory for the Hmong and their US Republican advocates, tens of thousands of Thai-based Hmong refugees were ultimately granted US immigration rights. The majority were resettled in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. The defeat of the repatriation initiative resulted in the reunifications in the US of many long-separated Hmong families. In 2006, as a reflection of the growth of the minority in the state, the Wisconsin State Elections Board translated state voting documents into the Hmong language.
Throughout the Vietnam War, and for two decades following it, the US government stated that there was no "Secret War" in Laos and that the US was not engaged in air or ground combat operations in Laos. In the late 1990s, however, several US conservatives, led by Johns and others, alleged that the Clinton administration was using the denial of this covert war to justify a repatriation of Thailand-based Hmong war veterans to Laos. It persuaded the US government to acknowledge the Secret War and to honor the Hmong and American veterans from the war.
On May 15, 1997, in a total reversal of US policy, the federal government acknowledged that it had supported a prolonged air and ground campaign in Laos against the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong. That day it dedicated the Laos Memorial on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery in honor of the Hmong and other combat veterans from the Secret War. In 1999 there were about 250,000 Hmong people living in the United States, living in numerous medium and large cities.
Some Hmong remained in refugee camps in Thailand at the time of the September 11, 2001, attacks. This resulted in the tightening of US immigration laws, especially under the Patriot Act and the Real ID Act, and the immigration of Hmong refugees to the US has significantly slowed. Most Hmong refugees in Thailand had been engaged in documented armed conflict during and after the Vietnam War. The anti-terrorism legislation created barriers to such people being accepted as immigrants.
Demographics
Hmong population in the US by areas of concentration
According to the 2010 US Census, 260,073 people of Hmong descent reside in the United States. This is an increase from 186,310 in 2000. The vast majority of growth since 2000 was from natural increase, except for the admission of a final group of over 15,000 refugees in 2004 and 2005 from Wat Tham Krabok in Thailand. Of the 260,073 Hmong Americans, 247,595 or 95.2% are fully Hmong, and the remaining 12,478 are part Hmong. The Hmong American population is among the youngest of all demographics in the United States. The majority of the population was born after 1980, and most mixed Hmong Americans are under 10 years old.States with the largest Hmong population include: California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, Michigan, Colorado, Georgia, Alaska, Oklahoma, and Oregon. The metropolitan areas of Fresno and Minneapolis-St. Paul have especially large Hmong communities. Saint Paul, Minnesota, has the largest Hmong population per capita in the United States, followed by Wausau in Wisconsin. The Hmong communities of Minnesota and Wisconsin are geographically and culturally interlinked, with sizeable Hmong communities present in most of the mid-size cities between Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
In terms of metropolitan area, the largest Hmong-American community is in Minneapolis-Saint Paul-Bloomington, MN Metro Area ; followed by Fresno, CA Metro Area ; Sacramento, CA Metro Area ; Milwaukee, WI Metro Area ; and Merced, CA Metro Area.
There are smaller Hmong communities scattered across the country, including cities in California; Colorado ; Michigan, Alaska ; North Carolina ; Georgia ; Wisconsin ; Kansas ; Oklahoma ; Southwest Missouri; Northwest Arkansas ; Washington; Oregon, Montana and throughout the United States.
Hmong by location
As of the 2000 US Census, the largest Hmong population by metropolitan area resided in and around Minneapolis-St. Paul, with 40,707 people. The following areas were Greater Fresno with 22,456 people, Greater Sacramento with 16,261, Greater Milwaukee with 8,078, Greater Merced with 6,148, Greater Stockton with 5,553, Appleton-Oshkosh-Neenah with 4,741, Greater Wausau with 4,453, Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir with 4,207, and Greater Detroit with 3,926.California
California has the largest Hmong population in the United States by state. As of 2010, there are 95,120 Hmong Americans in California.In 2002, the State of California counted about 35,000 students of Hmong descent in schools. According to Jay Schenirer, a member of the school board of the Sacramento City Unified School District, most of the students lived in the Central Valley, in an area ranging from Fresno to Marysville. Fresno County and Sacramento County combined have almost 12,000 Hmong students.
As of 2002, of the Hmong students who took the California English Language Development Test, which measures English fluency in students who are learning English, 15% of those identifying as Hmong scored at the "advanced" or "early advanced" classifications. In comparison, 30% of California's Vietnamese students studying English, and 21% of California's more than 1.5 million English learning students scored at that same advanced level. Suanna Gilman-Ponce, the multilingual education department head of Sacramento City Unified, said that the lower rates among Hmong students can be attributed to a higher percentage of parents who speak little English; therefore the children enter American schools with fewer English skills. In addition, their culture was not literate. There was no tradition of written Hmong history or literature.
In 2011, Susan B. Anthony Elementary School in Sacramento established a Hmong-language immersion program. In 2019, Fresno Unified School district began offering dual immersion as well as elective course offerings for high school students to learn the Hmong language.
In the Fresno Unified School District, more than 10,000 signatures of support were collected for the naming of a new elementary school for General Vang Pao, a well-known leader from the Secret Wars in Laos and the Hmong American diaspora.
Some Hmong families have moved to the Emerald Triangle region, including Trinity and Siskiyou counties, to work in the marijuana farming industry.