Refugees: America Must Do More

Abstract

hen Saigon fell to the Communist forces from North Vietnam in 1975, approximately 200,000 refugees, most of them Vietnamese supporters of the American-backed South Vietnamese government, fled from their homes. The Ford administration believed that the United States had a special obligation to these desperate people, and so more than half of them were quickly admitted to the United States for permanent resettlement. Because the war in Indochina had an indelible American stamp, it would have been unrealistic to expect other nations-with the exception of France, the former colonial power-to admit more than token numbers. The United States had to save these people because no one else would. Furthermore, in 1975 the flow of refugees from Indochina seemed finite. Once these unfortunates were resettled in the United States, most people thought, the problem would be solved. For about three years after the Communist victory and that initial great surge, the flow of refugees from Indochina settled at the predictable and manageable rate of around 3,000 a month. But in 1978 the Vietnamese government began systematically to persecute people it considered politically unreliable, including the indigenous ethnic Chinese. Growing numbers of both groups were forced into what the Vietnamese government called new economic zones or into the South China Sea in largely unseaworthy boats. In reaction to the brutality of the Vietnamese government, a coalition of American religious and humanitarian organizations formed a Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees. Last January it prepared and submitted to President Carter, the Depart-