House Panel Votes to Aid Soviet, Asia Immigrants

Trying to cut a growing backlog of people waiting to emigrate to America, a House panel Wednesday narrowly approved legislation to grant automatic refugee status to thousands of Soviets and Indochinese.

Under current law, everyone awarded refugee status must prove a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their home countries. The new measure would provide “presumptive refugee status” to groups known to suffer persecution, including Jews and Evangelical Christians in the Soviet Union and people fleeing political retribution in Southeast Asia.

Latinos protested the House subcommittee bill and related measures for favoring certain kinds of immigrants over others--particularly those from Latin America. “Discrimination in welcome” is how Margo de Ley, Midwest coordinator of Hermandad, a Latino rights organization, described the difference between U.S. policy toward Latinos and toward Soviets and Indochinese.

The bill, which passed 5 to 4 in the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and faces an uncertain fate in the full committee, is one of many efforts in Congress to address the problem of Soviet immigration now that the Soviet government has loosened restrictions on Jewish emigration.

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the United States admitted 20,421 Soviet citizens as refugees, along with 35,015 Asians, mostly Vietnamese. Meanwhile, 27,000 Soviet citizens wait outside the United States--20,000 in Moscow, 7,000 in temporary housing near Rome--as Immigration and Naturalization officials try to keep up with the crush of applicants.

“The Administration has said quite clearly it is going to take all these people,” said Rep. Bruce A. Morrison (D-Conn.), subcommittee chairman and sponsor of the bill that was passed Wednesday. “The only question is are those who come going to come with the full benefits of refugee status.”

Refugees are provided federal financial benefits denied to non-refugee immigrants.

Meanwhile, the House failed to act Wednesday on a 1989 supplemental bill that would have provided $100 million to help resettle refugees. Most of $85 million would go to Soviet Jews, while $15 million was designated for Africans and Southeast Asians.

Another bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), would transfer to the refugee resettlement effort $200 million from a fund established to help communities provide health care and English language teaching to immigrants who were newly legalized under the landmark 1986 immigration law.

Latinos, the largest group of newly legalized immigrants, have vigorously attacked all of these measures, particularly the Kennedy bill. They characterize the legislation as “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”