Vietnamese Seek Easing of Barriers for Refugees

Warning that the world is abandoning tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees scattered across Southeast Asia, Southern California Vietnamese leaders gathered Saturday in Westminster to press for reforms that would help refugees emigrate to the West.

“We’re trying to motivate the Vietnamese community in the United States to resolve this problem,” said Ban Binh Bui, a director of Delta Savings & Loan Assn. in Westminster and one of the leaders who gathered to discuss the call for international reforms. “We have to help ourselves first. We have to do this ourselves.”

Meeting at the offices of Nguoi Viet Daily News in Westminster, one of the largest Vietnamese-language newspapers in the nation, the leaders expressed concern that almost 14 years after the fall of Saigon, the world is losing interest in the plight of the estimated 67,000 refugees waiting permission to emigrate to the United States and other countries.

‘Compassion Fatigue’

“There is a compassion fatigue among nations in terms of the Vietnamese refugees,” said Bui, one of the leaders of Orange County’s Vietnamese community of more than 100,000. “We, as a community, have not done as much as we could for the boat people and those still living in the camps. We have to make our voice heard.”

Bui said the council of Southern California Vietnamese leaders represents about 325,000 people in San Diego, Orange County and Los Angeles--the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam.

He said the group would put its recommendations in writing and then send representatives to a conference on Indochinese refugees scheduled in June in Geneva.

More than 100 nations, including Vietnam, will send delegates to the conference to adopt worldwide regulations regarding the screening and processing of Vietnamese refugees. Bui expressed concern over current screening procedures, saying they make it difficult for people to quality for visas to the West because so many refugees are found to have fled for economic reasons. The United States accepts politically persecuted refugees but not refugees who come for economic reasons.

The United States, Bui said, also has tightened its own quotas for Vietnamese immigrants and recently reallocated 6,500 slots reserved for Vietnamese to Soviet immigrants, many of them Armenians and Soviet Jews. The message this sent to the world, he said, was that America did not feel it could accept more Vietnamese.

“The main goal is to make the (immigration) policy fair,” said Thai Anh Quang Dinh, an official of the SOS Boat People organization who worked with Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong. “We have to remember that we were refugees, and we are refugees. We have to do everything we can.”

‘Make Voices Heard’

Van Thai Tran, a UC Irvine student and former legislative coordinator of the refugee assistance organization Project Ngoc (Pearl), said it was important for those already living in the United States “to make our voices heard in Geneva. I think it’s hypocritical for these nations to get together to talk about the fate of the Vietnamese people without having our own input.”

Tran said it was likely that the Geneva conference would adopt a flawed screening policy that makes it “convenient to label these people economic refugees” and not victims of political persecution, thereby denying them visas to the West.

Tran said the U.S. government had established a ceiling of 23,000 Vietnamese refugees allowed to enter each year, down from a high of 170,000 in 1979. For the fiscal year 1990-1991, he said probably 20,000 Vietnamese would arrive in the United States.

If this continues, conference organizers said, they fear that Thailand and Hong Kong, where many refugees are temporarily held, would continue to turn away incoming boat people.

Thousands of those refugees are abused and victimized both on the high seas and in the (refugee) camps, “and all because they sought freedom,” Tran said.

“Once the West recoiled in horror at these reports from the South China Sea,” said Tom Wilson, a member of Project Ngoc who has spent time working with the refugees in Thailand. “Today, the West turns its back--and worse yet, it belittles these brave freedom seekers by denying that they are refugees.

“The piracy problem (in the South China Sea) has not ended,” he said. “Obviously, the problems in Vietnam that cause its people to flee have not ended.”

Wilson said the document adopted in Geneva “will probably insist that most are not legitimate refugees. It will probably insist on forcible repatriation, sending them back to Vietnam, or else confining them for the rest of their lives to detention camps.”

The council of Vietnamese leaders planned a follow-up conference in Westminster on April 23, during which the declaration to be submitted at Geneva would be adopted.