Journal of Transnational American Studies

In 1954, the US expanded its military presence in South Viet Nam following decolonization from France, claiming to help refugees escape communism. However, Vietnamese people rarely use the term “refugee,” seeing themselves as internally displaced people who never crossed international borders. I examine how the concept of “refugee” functions as a settler colonial technology that fosters Vietnamese settler refugeeism, serving both the US empire and Vietnamese ethnonationalist goals. The article explores two key points: first, how refugee resettlement in the Cái Sắn canals consolidated Kinh dominance and dispossessed Indigenous Khmer Krom in the Mekong Delta; second, what it means to engage with the land as a form of relationship-building. Centering internally displaced Vietnamese within the land's history, this work offers a counternarrative to US state-sponsored historiography. Grounded in migration and settler colonial studies and engaging with Vietnamese studies, I posit that internal refugees should not be treated solely as pathological or juridical object, but rather as an analytical category linked to broader practices of domination and exploitation.