Deporting Vietnamese Criminals

For obvious historical reasons, the US has been reluctant to deport people to Communist countries, including Cuba, the former Soviet Union, and Communist Vietnam . The State Department has just reached a deportation agreement with Vietnam:

San Jose Mercury News - Thousands of Vietnamese living illegally in U.S. face deportation
By Jessie Mangaliman
Mercury News
Article Launched: 01/22/2008 06:12:57 PM PST

In two months, the U.S. government will begin deporting more than 8,000 illegal Vietnamese immigrants as the result of a long-sought repatriation agreement signed Tuesday by Washington and Hanoi.

The pact deals with a once-verboten subject in the emigre community - the forced return of Vietnamese nationals to their communist homeland - and it underscores how close Vietnam and the United States have become.

In addition, the muted reaction Tuesday in San Jose's 100,000-strong Vietnamese community illustrated how much emigre politics have changed in the once rigidly anti-communist community.

Although some worried that the communist regime might retaliate against repatriated emigres, most Vietnamese-Americans interviewed Tuesday seemed to view the agreement as a natural outcome of the growing ties between two former enemies.

"It's normal," said Hoang Co Dinh of San Jose, a member of the Vietnam pro-democracy group Viet Tan.[More]

The other point is that most of these people aren't being deported just for being illegal immigrants--they're really being deported for variuous fairly serious crimes:

Most of the illegal immigrants - about 7,300 Vietnamese - have criminal convictions that made them subject to deportation, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Others overstayed visitors visas.