After the fall of Vietnam and Laos in 1975, over 100, 000 Hmong rebels settled in America.
ECONOMIST: America foils a coup plot against one of its former enemies
But, for all the difficulties, the principle of sheltering the Hmong is a decent one.
Those linked to ragtag Hmong rebels in remote mountain areas are deemed particularly vulnerable.
And conservative Minnesotans have tended to look askance at Hmong traditions such as polygamy and animal sacrifice.
During the Vietnam war, American spies recruited members of Laos's Hmong ethnic minority to attack Vietnamese supply lines.
ECONOMIST: America foils a coup plot against one of its former enemies
Human-rights groups say the Hmong may face persecution in Laos and that their forced return violates international law.
The Kosovars are not likely to end up like the Hungarians or the Vietnamese, let alone the Hmong.
In 1974, the triumphant communists turned on the Hmong, many of whom fled to refugee camps in Thailand.
Then her spirit and her body left Thailand just as the Hmong had left so many other countries.
Trying to leap from a peasant society to industrial America, many Hmong ended up in poverty or on welfare.
Recruited by the CIA to fight in the 1960s, the Hmong were among the losers in the Vietnam war.
There are now about 180, 000 Hmong in America, roughly a third of them clustered in Minneapolis and St Paul.
In 2004 America agreed to take in another 14, 000 or so Hmong who had been staying at a Thai temple.
She had heard stories of how Hmong people did not have a country, how we always had to leave places behind.
The feeling that she was Hmong did not happen until the preparations for America began as her family was being processed.
America then took the Hmong in, with communities growing in California and Minnesota, where Lutheran church groups tried to help out.
More than 4, 000 ethnic Hmong refugees were repatriated from Thailand to Laos, despite fears that some of them might face persecution.
You are going to America as Hmong from the camps of Thailand.
For one thing, the Hmong and the southerners traditionally hate each other.
But the most striking cold-war responsibility story is that of the Hmong.
The North Vietnamese soldiers and the communist Pathet Lao soldiers could not and would not tell the difference: Hmong was only skin deep.
This week the Thai army loaded 4, 351 ethnic Hmong onto lorries and drove them to the border with Laos, whence they had fled.
Until the war in Indochina, the Hmong were a small, isolated community of farmers living in the highlands of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
For example, 29 percent of Vietnamese-Americans, 38 percent of Hmong-Americans, 33 percent of Laotian-Americans, and 37 percent of Cambodian-Americans do not complete high school.
As years went by with no sign of Laos's communists being dislodged from power, many Hmong exiles in America began to wonder just where their money was going.
ECONOMIST: America foils a coup plot against one of its former enemies
When I was growing up in Central California, which is home to a large population of immigrants from Southeast Asia, thousands would gather to celebrate Hmong New Year.
The American pilots dropped first from the sky, injured and scared, into the Hmong villages on Phou Bia Mountain, and we helped them get better again in the depths of the jungle.
NGOs are worried about the humanitarian cost of the war on drugs, which has already caused the displacement of some 25, 000 Hmong, Akha, and other tribes from their traditional homes in the mountains to the valleys.
With these complications how can a government that does not have total control outside the capital unite over 240 ethnic groups and have a chance of steering the country into the future regardless of what the Hmong do?
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