North Carolina holds the largest Dega community outside Vietnam, but it is not the only one. There are Dega in France, in at least five other American states, and in Cambodia — where the Jarai and the Bunong were never a diaspora at all, because the border was drawn through them. This page is what we can establish about the rest, and it is thinner than we would like.
Before 1986 there were about thirty
That is the figure worth starting from. Before the first resettlement, roughly thirty Dega lived scattered across the United States — a handful of individuals, mostly connected to American servicemen. Everything since has grown from the 1986 group of around two hundred, the 402 who came in December 1992, the family reunification and Orderly Departure arrivals through the 1990s, and the roughly 900 who arrived in the summer of 2002.
Where the American community is
| Place | Figure | As at |
|---|---|---|
| Greensboro, North Carolina | about 2,000 | 2000 |
| Charlotte | about 700 | 2000 |
| Raleigh | about 400 | 2000 |
| New Bern | a fourth site from 2002 | 2002 |
| California, Florida, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Washington | small communities; no figures published | — |
The pattern outside North Carolina is secondary migration rather than placement: people resettled elsewhere by an agency and then moved, or families who followed work. The blank cells in that table are real — we have found no published count for any of the five states.
France
France has a Dega community whose origins are older and different. Around five thousand Bahnar are reported as living there. The connection runs back through the mission at Kon Tum, through the colonial school system, and through the Dega men who served in the French army across Indochina and were in some cases evacuated with it. It is the one part of the diaspora that predates the American war, and the one we know least about.
Cambodia, which is not a diaspora
The Jarai of Ratanakiri — about a quarter of that province's population — and the Bunong of Mondulkiri are not exiles. They are the other side of a line drawn in Paris through a single people. That is why Mondulkiri was where FULRO could survive for seventeen years, why it was the obvious refuge after 2001, and why the camps of 2001–2005 were not, for most of the people in them, a foreign country.
It is also why the dams matter on both sides of the border at once: the same river, the same people, one government's decision.
What the community built
The Montagnard Dega Association was formed in 1987, a year after the first arrivals, for mutual assistance and cultural events. The churches — Rhade-, Jarai- and Bahnar-language congregations, mostly evangelical Protestant, with roughly a thousand Catholics — do most of the work a state agency would do elsewhere: interpreting, funerals, housing, finding a cousin a job.
Work is factory, warehouse, landscaping and maintenance. The earlier arrivals reached low-income self-sufficiency within about five years; the 2002 group, who came as villagers rather than soldiers, had a much harder time of it. Educational background explains a good deal of that: men arriving from the highlands typically had about five years of schooling, and average literacy around third grade — which is the downstream consequence of the schools.
The thing the diaspora is for
Almost every document that survives about the Dega survives outside Vietnam. Service papers, camp rosters, photographs, letters, the names of villages that no longer carry those names — inside the highlands almost none of that can safely be kept. A community of a few thousand people in the American south, and a few thousand more in France, is currently the archive of a people of several hundred thousand.
That is a fragile arrangement and it is ageing. The men who arrived in 1986 were soldiers in 1975; the 1992 group came out of seventeen years in a forest. Their grandchildren speak English. Whatever is not recorded while that generation is alive is not recorded.
The generation question
Traditional animism has largely been set down in the United States; the churches carry the community instead. A second and now third generation has grown up American, with the ordinary diaspora strain on top of an unusual one: the elders' whole adult lives were a war the country they now live in has largely forgotten it fought, followed by a persecution it has never much noticed.
What the younger generation has that the elders did not is English, citizenship, and the ability to write to a congressman. Most of the submissions that reach UN bodies about the Central Highlands now come from people in that position.
Sources
- Raleigh Bailey, The Montagnards: Their History and Culture (Center for Applied Linguistics) — the pre-1986 figure of about thirty, the city breakdown, the five other states, tribal populations, religion, employment and education
- ANCHOR: A North Carolina History, The Montagnards — the arrival waves
- Bahnar people — around 10,000 in the United States and some 5,000 in France
- Jarai people — 26,922 in Cambodia, about 23 per cent of Ratanakiri
Compiled September 2026. This is the thinnest page in the library and we know it. We have no current count for any community outside North Carolina, nothing on the French community's own organisations, and nothing at all on Dega in Canada, Australia or elsewhere in Europe. If you are part of one of those communities, please write — a rough number and a city would be a real improvement on what is here.