Concern Over Refugee Policy Is Voiced in Little Saigon

About 150 people--mostly Vietnamese immigrants--met Sunday in Little Saigon in Westminster to express their concern over policies toward Vietnamese refugees that will be under consideration by “first asylum” countries meeting in Geneva next month.

The local conference was organized by Nhiem Tong of Cerritos, a Caltrans engineer who escaped by boat from Vietnam 14 years ago, and Tom Wilson of Irvine, a Tustin High School physics teacher whose Vietnamese wife is trapped in a refugee camp along the Thai-Cambodia border.

Wilson said he is particularly concerned that a new screening process put into effect a year ago in Hong Kong--where the largest number of Vietnamese refugees go first for asylum--will be adopted by other countries that receive large numbers of these refugees. Other first-asylum countries include Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

“We believe the screening is spurious,” said Wilson. “We’re trying to bring the world’s attention to the fact (that) we believe screening implies forced repatriation.”

Only 3 of 12,000

Wilson said that if the screening policy is put into effect by those countries, it will condemn tens of thousands of refugees to a life in which they can never be accepted by their new countries and also can never return to their homeland.

Hong Kong’s new policy has allowed only three people of 12,000 screened to earn official “refugee” status, according to Simon Ripley, a London attorney who was a speaker Sunday at the Westminster conference.

Ripley said the remaining refugees have been declared “economic migrants” who are put in camps awaiting repatriation. These migrants are subject to forceable return at any time, he said. Most, he said, fear that they would be imprisoned, or worse, by the communist government in Vietnam.

Wilson and others at the conference wore black ribbons pinned to their clothing to express mourning for the death of 130 Vietnamese “boat people” last week. The boat of refugees attempting to escape their country was attacked by pirates. There was only one survivor.

Tong and Wilson said they hope to send one or two representatives to Geneva. “We want to voice our objection to this,” Tong said.

Wilson said he met his wife, Dinh Thi Kim Huyen, when she was his interpreter during his six-month stay at Site 2 camp in Thailand. They were married at the camp, which he said she has little hope of leaving.

He said Sunday’s conference “is about her, but it’s about everyone.”