[75] The largest communities are in the United States, with over 2.3 million Vietnamese Americans, alongside significant populations in France, Australia, and Germany.

[81] Overseas Vietnamese continue to maintain strong cultural connections, including continued use of the Vietnamese language,[82] observance of traditional festivals such as Tết (Lunar New Year),[83] and close familial and economic connections, including approximately $14 billion USD in annual remittances to Vietnam.

The report also said that "the total amount of remittances sent back from all Vietnamese workers overseas now exceeds $2 billion a year.

On April 30, the final U.S. troops and diplomats left Saigon and the country came under the control of the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

[103] Most immigrants fled to the United States as refugees following the end of the Vietnam War, arriving in three distinct waves from the 1960s to the 1990s.

[105] That year, President Jimmy Carter doubled the number of Southeast Asian refugees accepted into the United States, from 7,000 to 14,000.

[116] The colonial period saw a significant representation of Vietnamese students in France, as well as professional and blue-collar workers, with many settling permanently.

[117] The country would continue to be home to by far the largest overseas Vietnamese population outside Asia until the 1980s, when a higher number of Vietnam War refugees resettled in the United States.

The largest influx of Vietnamese people, however, arrived in France as refugees after the Fall of Saigon and end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

[117] Most Vietnamese in France live in Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France area, but a significant number also reside in major urban centers in the south-east of the country, primarily Marseille, Lyon, and Toulouse.

[121][122] The pro-communist camp is the more established of the two and was the larger group until the 1970s, consisting mainly of students, workers, and long-established immigrants who arrived before 1975 and their descendants.

[120] This political rift remained minor until the Fall of Saigon in 1975 when staunchly anti-communist refugees from South Vietnam arrived and established community networks and institutions.

Such political divisions have prevented the Vietnamese in France from forming a strong, unified community in their host nation, as their counterparts have in North America and Australia (1980).

Of those from the Vietnam War era, many Vietnamese Australians are white-collar professionals, while others work primarily in blue-collar jobs.

Under these agreements, guest workers from Vietnam were brought to East Germany, where they soon made up the largest immigrant group[132] and were provided with technical training.

[139][140] The Essex lorry deaths highlighted the issue of illegal Vietnamese immigrants being smuggled from poverty-stricken regions of Vietnam to other parts of the world.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Belgium became a popular alternative destination to France for South Vietnamese seeking higher education and career opportunities abroad.

[144] The Vietnamese Belgian population largely resides in and around the capital of Brussels or in the southern French-speaking Wallonia region, especially around the city of Liège.

As in France, South Vietnamese refugees to Belgium were largely of higher social standing and integrated much easier into their host country's society than their peers who settled in North America, Australia and the rest of Europe due to better linguistic and cultural knowledge.

A much smaller number of North Vietnamese workers also arrived from eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

[148] Under international agreements in 1980, Bulgaria and other Warsaw Pact members accepted Vietnamese guest workers who were sponsored by the communist government into the country as a relatively inexpensive manual labour workforce.

[154] Vietnamese form one of the largest foreign ethnic groups in Taiwan, with a resident population of around 200,000, including students and migrant workers.

[159] Most of the community, however, is composed of refugees admitted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as well as a smaller proportion of migrant laborers who began arriving in 1994.

[160][161] As Vietnam and Laos are neighbors, there has been a long history of population migrations between the territories making up the two respective countries.

Under the Hong Kong government's Comprehensive Plan of Action, newly arriving Vietnamese were classified as either political refugees or economic migrants.

They were housed in a temporary refugee camp known as the Philippine First Asylum Center (PFAC) in the city of Puerto Princesa.

In the decades that followed however, the Vietnamese population dwindled greatly as they finally got approval for resettlement in the United States, Canada, Australia or Western Europe.

[172] Those who left before the South Vietnamese exodus starting in 1975, largely residing in France, generally identify their sentiments as somewhere in between the two polarities.

[170] A large portion of the Vietnamese diaspora who fled from South Vietnam after its fall and now living in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania have been religious (Christian, Buddhist, Caodaist) and anti-communist, while the Vietnamese living in Eastern Europe and Asia are more aligned to irreligion, and, to a lesser extent, folk religions and Buddhism.

[173][174][175] The former South Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ returned to Vietnam in 2004 and was generally positive about his experience.