This book traces the American approach to normalization with Vietnam after 1975. It argues understanding the resumption of officials ties between Washington and Hanoi requires centering the migration programs that brought over one million South Vietnamese to the United States. These processes were not merely simultaneous, they were mutually constitutive. Negotiating and implementing migration programs for South Vietnamese became the basis of normalization between Washington and Hanoi. Rather than a moment, something that occurred instantaneously with the announcement of resumed relations, normalization was a highly contentious, often contradictory process where nonexecutive actors played crucial roles. A close examination of the American approach to US-SRV normalization sheds light not only on the vitally important postwar reconciliation process, but also helps us better understand three major transformations of the late twentieth century: the reassertion of US Congress in American foreign policy; the Indochinese diaspora and changing domestic and international refugee norms; and, the intertwining of humanitarianism and the human rights movement. By tracing these domestic, regional, and global phenomena, After Saigon's Fall captures the contingencies and contradictions inherent in US-Vietnamese normalization and also reveals much about US politics and society in last quarter of the twentieth century"--