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Thailand The Vietnamese
In the mid-1970s, the number of Vietnamese in Thailand was
estimated at between 60,000 and 70,000, most of them in the
Northeast. Three broad categories of Vietnamese were in the
country. The first were the descendants of persons who fled from
political upheaval and persecution during the precolonial era in
the late eighteenth century and through much of the nineteenth
century. Most of them settled either in Bangkok or in the area
southeast of it, and many of their descendants were absorbed into
Thai society, although some still lived in villages that were
identifiably Vietnamese. Many who came in the nineteenth century
were refugees from anti-Catholic persecution by rulers in
Cochinchina (southern Vietnam, around the Mekong Delta) before
the French established political control over that area. The
second category consisted of persons who opposed the
establishment of French domination over all Vietnam in 1884 and
presumably expected their stay in Thailand to be short. With some
exceptions, however, their descendants and those of other
Vietnamese who came to Thailand in the first decades of the
twentieth century remained. The earliest arrivals in this
category, like their predecessors, mostly came to southeast
Thailand. Later immigrants tended to go to the Northeast. The
third category included those who fled from Vietnam between the
end of World War II in 1945 and the consolidation of North
Vietnamese rule over all of Vietnam in 1975. For those who came
after the Second Indochina War had ended, Thailand was simply a
way station en route to somewhere else, usually the United
States.
Most of the 40,000 to 50,000 Vietnamese who came in 1946 and
shortly thereafter were driven from Laos by the French, who were
then reimposing their rule over all of Indochina. More Vietnamese
came later, and, like those who came in the 1920s and 1930s, they
expected to return to Vietnam. Between 1958 and 1964 (when the
intensification of the war in Vietnam inhibited their return),
arrangements were made for the repatriation of Vietnamese to the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), and an estimated
40,000 left Thailand. Over the years a few families went to the
Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The movements of this
period, both voluntary and involuntary, left between 60,000 and
70,000 Vietnamese in Thailand, an undetermined portion of which
were post-World War II migrants who could not or would not return
to their homeland.
Data as of September 1987
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