It's really unfortunate reading some of these comments, conflating economic migrants with refugees... or that being a refugee meant that you're poor and uneducated.
I want to put into perspective that the same comments were made after the fall of Saigon 1975 when 1.8 million Vietnamese fled, most of them by boats.
People said to worry about our nation's homeless and veterans first. That we'd be letting in Communists, the irony is that they were fleeing it. And that Vietnamese were so foreign, they'd never be able to assimilate into American culture.
My dad left on April 29th, 1975. He left aboard the LST505 which was escorted by the American fleet with dozens of other military and civilian craft to Subic Bay before being sent to Guam in the weeks after the fall. I asked him if he felt relieved the day he landed in Camp Pendleton, you know what he said to me?
"I was so sad. I was so sad more than you could know. I had no money. I spoke no English. I missed my friends and my family. When there was turbulence on the plane crossing the ocean, I wanted it to crash so I could die and forget everything."
My mom left in 1980 not because she was endangered for her life, but because life had gotten so hard under Communist rule that she needed to if she were to have any future. She was 1 of 7 siblings. She attempted to escape 8 times. Imagine how hard that must be for someone to say good-bye to their parents one last time that many times, or to never see their parents again before they pass away. That life was so rough you'd risk everything at sea. She spent 4 days at sea on a crowded boat not meant to navigate open water, drank two tablespoons of water a day and was rescued by a West German cargo ship after being captured and held at gunpoint by Communist patrols. You want to know her background? She wasn't poor and uneducated. She grew up in a upper middle class family. Had a driver that would take her to school, spoke French fluently, and used to watching Wuthering Heights as a teenager.
Refugees don't want to leave their homeland looking for handouts. They don't want to leave their old parents or grandparents, or have their cousins and friends spread to the four corners of the earth of move to a new country where they don't speak the language or understand the culture.