"All in the Family: Lao Family, Control Data, the Reagan Administration's efforts to Build a Hmong Diaspora in the American Heartland"

This paper considers efforts to integrate recently resettled refugees from the Vietnam War into a formal labor market during the Reagan administration. Specifically, the paper zeroes in on the joint effort of Ambassador H. Eugene Douglas (Reagan’s “ambassador-at-large” dedicated to refugee affairs), Lao Family (a nonprofit providing services for Lao immigrants to the US), and Control Data Corporation (a Minnesota-based computer producer) to place Lao and Hmong refugees at Control Data’s bindery operation on Selby Avenue. This particular shop printed, collated, and bound all of the company’s technical manuals and marketing materials. The “Selby Bindery,” as it was called, was in operation since the early 1970s. Although the bindery originally employed largely Black single mothers, who lived nearby, on a part-time basis. The plant became a major source of employment for Hmong women settling in the St. Paul area during the 1980s. A central observation is that the primary ambition of this resettlement project on the part of the Reagan administration was to quell secondary migration of recently resettled Hmong refugees from Minnesota to California’s Central Valley—and thus ease federal allocations for refugee entitlements to the state of California. California received a greater share of these funds compared to other states, given the large number of refugees the state historically took in. The paper furthermore considers how this more singular effort intersected with Reagan-era industrial policy, a shifting consensus over the relationship between welfare and private sector employment, and federal debates over immigration reform during the Reagan administration.