Emigre Decision : Plan Shocks Vietnamese in Orange County

President Reagan’s decision to increase quotas for Soviet emigres by cutting those for Southeast Asians has left many in Orange County’s Vietnamese community feeling shocked, disappointed and abandoned.

“As Vietnamese, we have strongly supported President Reagan because of his stand against communism. But his decision was a political one and this issue is a human one,” said Ky Ngo, who came to the United States in 1975 and whose greatest concern has been the family he left in Vietnam. “It’s left us shocked.”

Ngo--who has brought several brothers and sisters to the United States and has been trying desperately for the last several years to bring over his terminally ill younger brother--is a prominent Vietnamese booster for the Republican Party in Orange County.

On Thursday, however, Ngo and many of the 130,000 Vietnamese residents of Orange County called Reagan’s decision “insensitive.”

“I had (Vietnamese) people calling me up today, saying, ‘Ky, Ky, why has he done this? Why has President Reagan turned his back on us?’ ” said Ngo, who last summer was the first Vietnamese-born delegate to the Republican National Convention, and lobbied successfully for language supporting increased quotas for Indochinese refugees as part of the GOP platform.

Reagan’s decision would give Soviet emigres 6,500 of the 53,000 refugee places originally set for Southeast Asians. It increases the number of Soviet refugees to the United States this year by 39%, to a total of 25,000--far short of the estimated 50,000 people, mostly Jews and Armenians, expected seek entry in 1989 as refugees from the Soviet Union.

Most of the increase will be achieved by shifting 5,500 slots for Vietnamese political prisoners, reducing that quota to 19,500. Also cut by 1,000 will be the quota for refugees seeking admission from camps in Hong Kong, Thailand or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, and by trimming 500 from the quota of refugees from the Near East and South Asia, mostly Afghanistan, federal officials said.

Many Vietnamese said they understood why a U.S. President would help Soviet refugees leave the Soviet Union. What was bitter for them, they said, was giving the Soviet refugees priority.

“The Soviet refugees didn’t have their country taken over by Communists and they didn’t lose family members fighting for freedom either,” said Tue Ngo of Westminster, a former captain in the South Vietnamese army. “I fought in the war. I lost many friends and relatives.”

Tue Ngo, who is not related to Ky Ngo, has been trying to help his sister emigrate from Vietnam, as well as a sister-in-law and her husband who are in a Malaysian refugee camp.

“We believe the Vietnamese people deserve a priority to come to the United States because we were allies during the (Vietnam) war,” he said.

His brother-in-law, Dep Tran, also was in the South Vietnamese army and was arrested by the Communists after Saigon fell in 1975 because Tran had helped U.S. special forces.

“He spent 8 years in, well, you call it a re-education camp, but I call it a prison,” Tue Ngo said. “He was released and took his wife and escaped Vietnam by boat because the government prevented him from getting a job to support his family. They had to live on what money his wife could make and they were starving.”

Before the change in quotas, immigration officials told Ngo it would take at least 18 months before his relatives could come to America. “Now we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said.

For Janet Tran, bringing her brother to the United States has been a dream since she fled Vietnam and arrived in Orange County almost a decade ago.

At age 30, she is alone in the United States and earns a living as an accountant for a pharmacy in Orange County’s Little Saigon in Westminster. Once a week, she also tapes a news show in Vietnamese that airs each Saturday on KSCI, Channel 18. KSCI broadcasts from San Bernardino, but its offices are in West Los Angeles.

She wants to become the Tran family’s anchor for a better life outside Vietnam. She has not seen her family in 9 years, but said she cannot afford to travel to Thailand, where her brother, Thanh Tran, fled.

“He escaped Vietnam through Cambodia then got on a boat and ended up in a Thailand refugee camp. He’s been there 17 months and was recently told by a camp officer that it would take about 6 years to be reunited with me. . . . He writes to me that he gets depressed and I don’t know how to help him,” Tran said.

“Now, President Reagan has done this thing for the Soviet refugees. I’m not against helping other refugees because they also need help. But why did President Reagan take our number of places and give them away?”

Last March, the State Department proposed shifting limited refugee slots from Southeast Asia to the Soviet Union.

Le Xuan Khoa, president of the Washington-based Indochina Resource Action Center, joined the president of the American Jewish Committee in a letter to the New York Times opposing such action as a “cruel trade-off.”

The Reagan Administration has pressured the Soviet Union to step up Jewish emigration. Now, with the Jewish exodus at a 9-year high, the United States has been unable to process all who left the Soviet Union with exit permits for Israel, but then sought entry here upon reaching Vienna or Rome.

The President could have increased the total number of admissions to avoid cutting a quota for any region. He chose not to, because it would have increased spending, Administration officials said. To allay fears of other emigres, senior U.S. officials have said they have considerable flexibility to alter the totals later in the year. But Southeast Asian leaders are not convinced.

“It’s left us shocked,” Le Xuan Khoa, president of the Washington-based Indochina Resource Action Center, said Thursday of Reagan’s move. “George Bush’s Administration has got to agree that this is an urgent situation. He has got to correct the problem.”