Reading here and there about what can only be viewed as corruption of various charitable agencies by an apparent flood-of government dollars, I am certain now that I was inadvertently present at the very start of that corruption – a warping of charitable concern towards refugees, as well as non-refugee migrants, the homeless, the addicted and the otherwise socially maladjusted. I was a college student in my junior year at a no-name public university, at the time of the fall of the South Vietnamese in 1975. My adolescent years had been haunted by the ongoing war in Vietnam, a war painted in the most horrific colors by the then-extent national media. I grew up in a place, a time and in a class of Americans where men were much more likely to be drafted and sentenced to serve for a year in what was painted by the national establishment media as a pointless, endless, thankless war.

We were relieved when it was all ended in 1972 – you have no idea of how the horror lifted, or maybe you do, if you are of an age to remember. And then horrified by the pictures of the scramble to get Americans and those Vietnamese citizens unfortunate to be American-adjacent and thus fearful of North Vietnam reprisals barely three years later. It seemed as if all the horrors were crashing in on us and the South Vietnamese again. The mobs of frantic Vietnamese at the gates of the embassy, helicopters loading up and taking off from the pad on the roof of the US Embassy, small boats laden to the gunwales with frantic Vietnamese families setting out from the shore in hopes of being rescued by ocean-going ships waiting offshore … The North Vietnamese had won, after all – and was there anything that we could do for people who had been our allies?

It seemed that there was something that we could do; the pastor of the church we attended at the time sent me as a representative of our congregation to a meeting to discuss what steps our denomination could take to sponsor refugee families through the auspices of Lutheran Social Services. Within weeks, I was neck deep in a local ad-hoc organization since we decided that our congregation did not have enough resources to sponsor refugees. By sponsorship, I mean that everything to assist a family or two of Vietnamese refugees over their first months or years in the US would come out of our resources: rent, fitting out a residence with the bare necessities, food assistance, transportation, finding employment, schooling, language lessons if necessary, and help coping with various bureaucracies.
So our church clubbed together with several other congregations and some local chapters of fraternal organizations – the Lions club was one. We took stock of what we offer and informed Lutheran Social Services that we thought we could sponsor a large extended family of up to 25 people. (It was our understanding that was the greatest need – support for large families.) We were informed several weeks later that we would be sponsoring three small families and three single young men – teenaged boys, really. We quickly found a small house and two apartments to rent and decided that perhaps the boys would best be situated with volunteer families, since the rent for three residences for two or three months was all that we could afford. It all worked out well, in the end – one of the families and the single young man who came to live with us stayed in touch for decades afterwards. They all found jobs, bought homes, built lives as Americans. A mostly happy ending, as these things go.

I must reiterate that all this support, monetary and otherwise, for the refugees that we and other local churches sponsored was the direct responsibility of our various local community groups. There were no grants of money passed on to us by Lutheran Social Services, although a congressional act passed in May, 1975 allocated funds to each of the national refugee assistance organizations based on how many individual refugees signed up to be assisted by them. Those funds amounted to $250 per person, adult and child. That specific sum sticks in my head for a particular reason; at least one of the assistance organizations in 1975 just passed those funds on to individual refugees overseen by their agency as a gift: pin money to help them start new lives. Word got around concerning this generosity, and the father of one of our refugee charges asked us (demanded, really) – why didn’t his family receive $1,000, for himself, wife and two children? We passed the enquiry to Lutheran Social Services and received their answer; their decision was to use the funds granted by Congress to help cover unforeseen and out-of-cycle needs like extensive and expensive medical care needed by some refugees. It was their way of doing things. The complaining refugee father continued demanding what he believed to be his rightful due and eventually changed agencies to get it. We were honestly glad to be rid of him, and rather sorry for his wife, who was sweet and shy and possibly rather embarrassed by her husband’s cash-grab.

When I read about how NGOs like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have since made bank out of getting government funds to resettle refugees and cart migrants all around the country in large groups, I am certain that 1975 was when the corruption of organized charity began. Refugee resettlement became a matter of getting a generous payout from the government, rather than depending on the efforts of small self-organized groups in local communities to help refugee clients settle into the US. Resettlement became a means of fattening on some of that big-government cash; a vital part of the refugee/migrant funding complex. Discuss as you wish.