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WTK Hmong Refugees
Background Information
At the end of the Vietnam conflicts in 1975, hundreds of thousands Hmong people fled Laos to seek safety in Thailand. These Hmong people who fled Laos supported and assisted the United States (U.S.) during the Vietnam conflicts. Thailand provided many refugee camps to house the Hmong people who had fled Laos, but in the mid 1990s the last of the camps were closed. For fear of repatriation, many Hmong refugees moved to the Buddhist Temple of WTK in Thailand to be with relatives and to find sanctuary. Through the years, there have been so many negative political changes in WTK that the Buddhist Temple can no longer continue to provide a safe haven for the Hmong people who settled in the Buddhist Temple’s land.
For many years, the U.S. State Department had not considered these Hmong refugees as candidates for resettlement to the U.S. However, in December 2003, U.S. officials shifted gears and declared that they would start processing Hmong refugee applications from WTK, Thailand beginning February 2004 from those Hmong refugees who were registered with the Thailand government and had been living at the Buddhist Temple since August 2003. An estimated 16,000 Hmong from Wat Tham Krabok were eligible to apply for U.S. entry for family reunification; of the 16,000 about 31 percent were resettled in California.
As of 1994, there are about 50,000 Laotians, including Hmong, who have resettled in California. The Central valley counties of Fresno, Sacramento, Merced and San Joaquin have the largest Hmong populations. The WTK Hmong refugees were expecting to reunite with their families. The impacted counties are Sacramento, Fresno, Merced, Tulare, Stanislaus, Yolo, Yuba, and San Joaquin. For details see the table of Hmong refugee arrivals to California for Federal Fiscal Year 1982 to 2003 [pdf]. The arrival of the first WTK Hmong refugees into California began in June 2004 ( Hmong refugee arrivals by California Counties June 2004-May 2007 [pdf]).
Most Hmong refugees living in the U.S. currently live in Minnesota, California and Wisconsin. In order to reunite with family members, the majority of Hmong refugees have resettled in these three states and in North Carolina.
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