Joe Biden likes to blow with the wind with whatever the cause du jour is, and probably the most obnoxious and disgusting of all his twists are in his past effort to keep our allies, the South Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees and boat people out of our country in the 1970s.  Here's what the Washington Examiner reported:

Joe Biden, the 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner and advocate of large-scale immigration, once tried to block the evacuation of tens of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees who had helped the United States during the Vietnam War.

As a senator, the future vice president, now 76, was adamant that the U.S. had "no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals," dismissing concerns for their safety as the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong swept south toward Saigon in 1975.

OMG.  These people were our authentic allies, and they paid a horrific price for Democrat congressional obstruction, posturing, and weak will on the Vietnam War, all to appease the far left — the hippies, the Ayerses, the Jane Fondas — leading to the loss of that friendly nation to the communist juggernaut.  The communists were on the march worldwide after that nightmare.

And today's Mister Open Borders, Joe Biden, wanted to keep these people out?  What irony.  And what we can discern from this is unholy political self-interest, all the way through.  Open borders today benefit Democrats — with illegally cast votes, with anchor-baby votes, with congressional seats for Democrats in virtually non-voting low-turnout districts, and with congressional seats assigned to Democrats based on these dead districts.  But way back in the 1970s and 1980s, boat people were an embarrassment to Democrats.  So Joe is nothing if not consistent. 

The story is this:

Way back in the Vietnam era, our men and women in uniform won that war with one hand tied behind their backs, and it was Biden's Democrats who threw that victory away.  And then, as a horrific coda, as we pulled out, we saw allies we had been working with — from the people on the roof of the Saigon embassy to the people in the countryside — take to sea, in rickety boats, to escape the horrific "re-education" camps set up by stone-cold Soviet- and Cuban-backed communist commissars, the very people who had tortured our troops in Vietnamese prison camps.  People starved, people got lost at sea, people drowned, people capsized — men, women, children, the most vulnerable babies.  And there were the pirates, the stuff of nightmares, preying on the boats as America's allies fled for their lives for any place that would take them, trying to escape.  And that was the better alternative to a smothering, suffocating, utterly freedomless life of communism, where people would be forced to grow up repeating lies and any expression of independent thinking would mean torture and death.

Why would Biden do that?  Well, because human beings don't matter to Biden unless they are politically useful.  And thousands of Vietnamese boat people here would have been an embarrassment and rebuke to Democrats, based on the Democrats' odious role in throwing away a U.S. victory in the Vietnam War.  The Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodians might have...talked about it.  Guilty conscience?  What, from Mister Catholic Joe Biden?  The guilt would have been in keeping them out — and many of those fleeing were his fellow Catholics, persecuted for their faith.  Yet Biden felt nothing.  No, just political keister-covering, hoping the whole thing would go away for the Democrats, sweeping the re-education camps out of sight and out of mind and, based on his past statements, probably some anti-Asian racism, too.

It was a strange, strange position to take, too.  The guy was based in Delaware, but I grew up in San Diego, which was where the boat people from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were being sent.  And with firsthand knowledge of this as a kid, I grew up with these refugees as they flowed in.  They came to the Linda Vista neighborhood, which was across the highway from mine, and transformed that shambling neighborhood from a crime-infested hellhole to a vibrant ethnic neighborhood with lots of McMansions and high-achieving kids, along with far less crime.

They were wonderful people, the world's most desirable immigrants, people who shared our values, showed us what industry was, and delighted us with their everyday ao dais and Vietnamese groceries and restaurants.  You can see still see the American and South Vietnamese flags in their neighborhood today — along with the occasional Trump bumper sticker.  I will upload some pictures I took a few months ago walking through Linda Vista to show it.

These Southeast Asian refugees impressed us in school, coming in with no language skills and assimilating quickly anyway.  The tough Laotian kids, who had fought communists in the mountains, taught the local bullies to not bother them. If you want to read about the neighborhood, here's one account I found the other day by a writer with an obviously Vietnamese name. 

How did we feel about this supposed invasion? We loved them. We wanted every last boat person here. The news of the boat people fleeing on the high seas and being hounded by pirates because they were in flight from something even worse were the stuff of nightmares for little kids such as myself. We prayed for the boat people. We sent donations to help them. We wanted them here, living here among us, safe. Every last one of them, no matter what. 

In short, they were real refugees who had sided with us and proved their loyalty by paying a price. As Americans here, we cared about them. 

And Biden was one of the few, the very few, the distant few, who wanted to leave them in the water with the pirates.