Immigrants Join to Back New Policies for Refugees

In an unprecedented act of unity, representatives from Orange County’s Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong and Vietnamese communities Saturday signed a document they had hammered out together: a list of recommendations to an international conference on the plight of Indochinese refugees.

The signing represents the first time that Orange County’s refugees have joined to create awareness of the refugee camp situation.

The recommendations will be forwarded to the International Conference on Indochinese Refugees that convenes in June in Geneva.

More than 100 countries, including the United States and Southeast Asian nations that host an estimated 700,000 refugees, are scheduled to attend the conference and plan refugee policy.

In addition to Orange County, other exile communities in Houston, San Jose, Canada and Australia held similar meetings and forwarded recommendations.

Conditions at Camps

The Orange County list urged improvement of conditions in overseas refugee camps and targeted screening procedures and “forced” repatriation programs for action.

“The most immediate concern with the Vietnamese community and others is voluntary repatriation,” said Van Thai Tran, a Vietnamese-born UC Irvine student who spoke at a news conference Saturday in Westminster’s Little Saigon.

Tran said that members of the U.S. Vietnamese exile community and others fear for the safety of their families and friends now in overseas camps.

Since March 14, thousands of immigrants in refugee camps in Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand have undergone a “flawed and unfair” screening process that favors sending refugees back to their homelands, Tran said.

The new screening process was patterned after a policy in Hong Kong, which began classifying all newly arrived “boat people” as illegal aliens last year. Hong Kong, which took the drastic action because of overcrowding, said it would lock up boat people in prison-like detention centers and eventually repatriate them to Vietnam.

Only those who could prove that they left Vietnam because of political persecution, perhaps 10% of the total, would be considered refugees eligible for resettlement in the West.

“These people will eventually be put in different camps in their home countries to suffer,” Tran said.

Not since the early 1980s, when news about the plight of boat people being victimized by pirates in the Gulf of Thailand reached the U.S. media, has such a large-scale effort as Saturday’s news conference been launched to arouse international compassion.

Attending the news conference were Nil Hul, a Long Beach resident representing Cambodians; Chongge S. Vang of Santa Ana, Laotian; Tou Yer Moua, Hmong community, and Mo Tu Nguyen of Laguna Niguel, Vietnamese.

In New York on Saturday, a group demonstrated at the United Nations and delivered copies of the Orange County recommendations, which were shipped earlier in the week, Tran said.

Local Southeast Asians such as Tran are convinced that improvement of the refugee situation must begin immediately. The current political conditions in Indochina force thousands of refugees to continue to escape from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, he said.

The list of recommendations released Saturday asks host governments to reject the policy of forcible repatriation, revoke the present screening program and reconfirm the right of all refugees to asylum.

It also asks asylum governments, particularly Thailand, Malaysia and the United States, to reassert their commitment to an anti-piracy program.