I said "probably not citizens" (the elder spoke no English) and the elder was about 80 when she came. Not a real strech to read the indicators.
So the oldest member of the family was old when they arrived here. What's your point?
They were allies and we bugged out on them. The Vietnamese, like the Cubans, are kind of a special case, and like the Cubans they are on our side. They are not leftists. They mostly do not like leftists and they vote Republican, that is pro America. Many of the ones that wound up in public housing are there due to the very aggressive recruiting of the various welfare agencies. I watched that here in the eighties. I heard welfare folks tell newly arrived Viets that if they did not sign up for all the welfare packages, housing, food stamps, medicaid, ALL of them, they would be deported. The first Viets here were averse to anything from government because their experiences of government, two kinds of government, were mostly bad and the Catholics had recourse to the Diocese whose people told them what the welfare folks could not really do. The Catholics stayed mostly out of the welfare trap. The less educated pagans, with no information recourse, got trapped. For a long time the lesson they learned was that in America you do all your business "under the table" but most realized after a few years of that that there is a ceiling on that sort of entrepreneurism and they mostly extricated themselves from the welfare trap and are out making businesses and earning legitimate money for their 401-ks.