Introduction

This paper examines the arrival of refugees from Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on Congressional debate and testimony, this paper follows the discourse of “self-sufficiency” that draws on the long histories of immigration, disability, race, and welfare.

Fiona Ngô

Fiona Ngô is an associate professor in Asian American studies and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ngô is the author of Imperial Blues (Duke University Press, 2014), which focuses on the role of imperialism in shaping the gendered, racial, and sexual logics of Jazz Age New York. With Elizabeth Stinson, she has co-edited a special issue of Women & Performance called “Punk Anteriors” (October 2012), to which she has contributed an article titled “Punk in the Shadow of War” about Los Angeles’s early punk scene through the lenses of space, violence, political economy, imperialism, and racial formation in the critical years following the official end of war in Viet Nam. She has also co-edited a special issue of positions on “Southeast Asian Diaspora” (Summer 2012) with Mimi Thi Nguyen and Mariam Lâm, and published an article called “Sense and Subjectivity,” concerning the figure of the Cambodian refugee, in camera obscura (May 2011).