‘Our Most Foreign Refugees’: Refugees from Vietnam in Britain

Britain’s response to the ‘boat people’ crisis, as Becky Taylor shows in this chapter, had at its heart a contradiction. On the one hand, Margaret Thatcher’s government was keen to be seen as an ally of the US in the Cold War, and still a leader on the international stage. On the other, the arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came at a time of growing anti-immigration rhetoric, Britain’s deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. This chapter explores how the tension between these different elements shaped Britain’s reception of the ‘boat people’, in particular pointing to the central place of voluntary organisations and multiculturalism in the resettlement programme.