‘Refugee’ Is a Misnomer for Soviet Armenian Emigres

As President Reagan favorably observed in his human-rights entreaties at the Moscow summit, Soviet emigration restrictions are being loosened in certain ways. But an apt adage for the shift in Kremlin policy might be, “When God wishes to punish us, he answers our prayers.”

The case in point is the recent surge in approvals of exit visas for Armenians. Unrelated to the unrest in the Soviet Armenian Republic and Azerbaijan, the Armenian exodus is being treated by the United States as a refugee flow. This follows the practice established for other categories of Soviet citizens who have managed to get out in the past.

Refugee officials have always been troubled by the notion that people leaving the Soviet Union are automatically assumed to be refugees. However, the numbers have been small and most have been Jews, against whom persecution is in evidence, so that the occasional case of a defecting circus performer or ballet dancer has been begrudgingly approved, albeit with a hard swallow. But the new, substantial flow of Armenians brings into full view a sticky point that has been pushed aside for years.

Before 1980 our laws defined a refugee as someone leaving a communist country or the Middle East. Thus Soviet citizens were automatically eligible. In a 1980 overhaul of refugee law the internationally accepted definition was adopted: A refugee is someone who can demonstrate a “well-founded fear of persecution.” There is scant evidence that these Armenians, as a group or individually, are in a more beleaguered position than are other Soviet citizens. They are leaving in search of freedom and a better life. This is not the province of refugee policy. Nonetheless, because of the eminence accorded the emigration question in U.S. policy and the very existence of exit procedures in the Soviet Union, we have strained to construct a refugee rationale to admit Soviet emigrants.

The distinction is not simply a legal nitpick. There are considerable entitlements available to these refugees, who have been arriving at a rate of about 1,200 a month. They cut into a shrinking bank account that has put the nation’s refugee program into a state of severe fiscal crisis just as a massive repatriation program is beginning in Afghanistan, first asylum is under siege in Southeast Asia, famine is again sweeping Ethiopia and hundreds of thousands of Mozambicans are stumbling into Malawi with stories of atrocities not heard since the Pol Pot era in Cambodia.

The picture is further clouded by a lack of enthusiasm for the Soviet Armenians by the Armenian community already here. Armenian Americans could sponsor some Soviet Armenians, enabling them to come as immigrants instead of refugees. But this requires filing petitions in behalf of eligible relatives and in some cases first applying for citizenship themselves. So far most have been cool to this approach.

We must face the contradictions in our response. The first step is to ensure that people eligible for refugee or immigrant status get it. The second is to acknowledge that we have a problem. The third is for the Administration to submit legislation to Congress establishing a category of humanitarian immigrants. Their admission would be contingent on a presidential finding that immigration for a designated group is in the national interest for humanitarian reasons. Review of such a designation and debate over the number and criteria for admission should occur during the annual consultations with Congress already mandated for the refugee program.

Our major partners in resettlement, Canada and Australia, have had comparable programs to augment their refugee efforts for years. For us, providing flexibility for foreign-policy contingencies in the immigration system would have applications well beyond the Armenian problem. Increasing numbers of Southeast Asians, for example, are leaving their homelands for economic rather than political-persecution reasons. Their circumstances are of compelling concern and may call for resettlement, but they are not legitimately refugees. In Central America a primary goal of U.S. policy has been to bolster the government of El Salvador. Despite widespread evidence of death-squad activity, we have not admitted Salvadorans as refugees because of the criticism that it would imply. A humanitarian immigrant program might have allowed a less doctrinaire response.

The summit was testimony to a profusion of new realities in the Soviet Union. But those new realities call for some new thinking from us, too.