U.S. Shelves Duarte’s Plea on Refugees

The Reagan Administration has quietly shelved a plea by El Salvador’s President Jose Napoleon Duarte for temporary refuge in the United States for as many as 500,000 Salvadorans who are living illegally in this country, according to Administration officials.

The officials said that Duarte’s request has not been rejected formally and may never be. Nevertheless, they said, there is virtually no chance it ever will be approved.

By burying the proposal without taking formal action on it, the Administration hopes to finesse the dilemma of either giving a public rebuff to Duarte--one of its closest allies in Central America--or bending the new U.S. immigration law in a way that could result in a flood of millions of other economic refugees.

Economic Damage Cited

In a letter to President Reagan last month, Duarte argued that if illegal immigrants from El Salvador were deported, it would further damage the already beleaguered Salvadoran economy. He said that money sent home by Salvadorans working in the United States is an important source of hard currency for his country.

The Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service immediately registered their opposition to Duarte’s request.

For the proposal to have any chance of being approved, Secretary of State George P. Shultz would have to give it a strong endorsement. He has not done so.

“It is a decision to be made by the attorney general, so I refer you to Justice,” State Department spokesman Charles Redman said this week when asked about the matter.

Justice Department spokesman Patrick S. Kortin said the department has “received no official communication from the senior levels of the State Department.”

Further, he said, “It is unlikely that we will change our position” against allowing the illegal immigrants to remain.

A spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service added, “Once you open that door, people will come with the belief that they may never have to go back.”

U.S. officials estimate that about 500,000 Salvadoran refugees live in the United States--about 300,000 of them in the Los Angeles area. They estimate that the refugees send $300 million to $350 million to relatives in El Salvador each year.

Central American University in San Salvador, however, puts the figures much higher. A study it is conducting says there are 1 million refugees in the United States and that they send about $1.3 billion home each year.

Most of the Salvadoran immigrants arrived in the United States after Jan. 1, 1982, the cutoff date for amnesty extended to illegal immigrants under the Immigration Reform Act of 1986, and thus do not qualify for legal resident status. They do not qualify as refugees because Washington has ruled that Salvadorans do not face persecution if they return home.

Special Status Sought

Duarte agreed that Salvadorans are not true political refugees, but he urged the United States to give them a special status, known as “Extended Voluntary Departure,” which allows illegal immigrants to remain indefinitely if there is severe disorder in their home country. El Salvador has been fighting Marxist insurgents for years, and the country was rocked by an earthquake last October.

Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), an author of the immigration reform act, objected strongly to making an exception to the law for the Salvadorans.

“His (Simpson’s) basic argument against it was that if you extend this to Salvadorans for what everybody acknowledges would be economic reasons, then you will put the United States in the position of granting similar access to this country to the citizens of any other nation that is poorer than the United States, and we are a very prosperous nation,” a spokeswoman for Simpson said.

She said Simpson argues that citizens of the Dominican Republic, Haiti and dozens of other countries could make a case similar to that of the Salvadorans.

The U.S. government traditionally is more lenient in approving requests for refugee status by immigrants from Communist countries than from other nations. A General Accounting Office study determined last fall that only 4% of the Salvadorans who cited persecution were granted asylum compared to 80% of the Poles who made similar claims.