Coming to America: the 5 biggest refugee groups of the last 20 years

The former Soviet Union wins in a landslide. Soviet Jews have been steadily streaming into the U.S. for decades, to the point of even insulting Israel, which campaigned hard on their behalf and had hoped to populate itself with the Jewish emigres.

The U.S. has long had an open policy to Jews, which continued even as the Soviets cracked open their borders. The Lautenberg Amendment, a special 1989 law, even granted refugee status to Jews from the former Soviet Union without having to prove specific persecution (a law vigorously opposed by President George H.W. Bush's administration). And in the 1990s, Russians of another persecuted faith -- evangelicals -- began flocking to America as well.

"Everyone saw communism as evil, and they saw these people as fleeing communists," Fred Lazin, the author of "The Struggle for Soviet Jewry in American Politics," told America Tonight about America’s openness to Soviet Jews in particular. "... And they’re white, and they’re well-educated."

When Saigon fell in 1975, the U.S. had no comprehensive refugee policy. Refugees were largely admitted on a temporary, ad hoc basis by the parole power of the Attorney General. When refugees from the South China Sea started arriving, their numbers swelled beyond expectations, each wave presenting a new crisis. Then, the government passed the 1980 Refugee Act, giving way to a universal definition for what it meant to be a refugee, and founded the resettlement program that exists to this day.

The U.S. had little choice but to accept these refugees. By the late '80s, Thailand and Malaysia started turning away Vietnamese "boat people." Many of these were South Vietnamese who had served their former government and then languished for a decade or more in reeducation camps, or fled after years of discrimination.

The Vietnamese exodus continued through the early '90s, and even for a couple years after the U.S. formally closed its resettlement program in 1994.

Starting in the mid-'90s, the U.S. began resettling large numbers of refugees from Bosnia, the breakaway nation most battered by Yugoslavia's civil war. "It was something of a foreign policy decision to emphasize the humanitarian over the military," says Frelick, adding that the U.S. also sought to bring attention to its diplomacy. "They didn't bring them to Geneva," he says about the 1995 Dayton Accords. "They brought them to Ohio."

The U.S. also brought in a significant number of Kosavar refugees against the advice of the State Department and the U.N., according to a paper by David Robinson, the deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. Announced during the American-led air strikes on Kosovo, the resettlement program was a "winning domestic public relations campaign," says Robinson.

News crews carried live the images of the first planeload of refugees landing at Fort Dix in 1999. A refugee who became a new dad just hours after his arrival told a crowded news conference that he hoped to name the baby boy "America."

By 2007, the U.N.’s refugee agency called the Iraqi exodus the "largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians" in 1948. But at that point, the U.S. had admitted fewer than 1,000 Iraqi refugees since the start of the war.

With growing outrage at home, the U.S. began accepting Iraqis in large waves in 2008. But many advocates remain critical of a program they claim is too bureaucratic to help vulnerable refugees, such as interpreters who aided the American war effort.

“The U.S. requires people to jump through various hoops, and particularly since 9/11 those are security-related hoops,” Frelick says. “In terms of emergency response to those in immediate danger, it’s proven to be pretty slow-moving and not that effective.“

In 2007, the United States began resettling enormous numbers of refugees from Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, many of whom had been living in camps on the Thai border for a decade or longer. The refugees had fled the world’s longest-running civil war, where torture, rape and the forced conscription of children were commonplace.

Thailand has long served as the reluctant haven to the persecuted of Southeast Asia. In this role, it has become both hostile to the U.N.’s refugee agency and hesitant to provide privileges that could create a “magnet effect” for more of the displaced.

“Because we’re constantly pressuring Thailand to do better about the refugees within its borders, we also give that third-country resettlement option,” Jennifer Quigley, the executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, told America Tonight. “When you’re pressuring Thailand to be that host country year after year, that’s something you offer.”