Ambassador Quinn Describes Effort to Bring South Vietnamese Refugees to Iowa in 1979

Dr. Kenneth M. Quinn, former U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, describes efforts by Iowa Governor Robert Ray to help bring Vietnamese refugees to Iowa in 1979. This segment is from the Iowa Experience: Vietnam panel discussion recorded at Iowa PBS in Johnston, IA on September 10, 2017.

Ambassador (retired), Kenneth M. Quinn: But our bond to the South Vietnamese continued as well. I was loaned to Governor Robert Ray and in 1979, when the vietnamese boat people started escaping from Vietnam, desperate to live lives of freedom and they would arrive at islands in southeast asia and be pushed back out to sea because not country in the world including the United States of America was accepting any more refugees. We had done our part. And to his everlasting credit Governor Ray wrote to President Carter and said “Iowa will double the number of refugees from Vietnam that we have already accepted; if you, Mr. President, will only reopen America’s doors.” And he went to Washington with a Democratic governor, another Republican governor and lobbied. Until in 1979 at the Boat People Conference in Geneva the United States announced it would take a hundred and sixty-eight thousand refugees from indochina a year. And so now there are a million Vietnamese refugees, refugees from indochina in our country. But it was the governor of Iowa who was the first and only governing official in the world who reached out that hand to accept those refugees to pay back our obligation to them from war.