U.S. Won’t Cut Admissions of Soviet Jews

New limits on the admission of Soviet refugees to the United States won’t reduce the number of Soviet Jews coming to the United States but will maintain their admissions at roughly 33,000 per year, Bush Administration officials said Sunday.

The Administration, swamped by applications from Soviet Jews, has tentatively decided to put a ceiling on Soviet refugee admissions to hold them at current levels, the officials said.

Soviet Jewish emigration to the United States has reached its highest level in a decade following a decision by the Soviet government to allow virtually free emigration.

‘Numbers So Large’

“The numbers being allowed out are so large that we can no longer work with them the way we could at an earlier time,” one official explained.

In the early 1980s, the Soviet Union allowed only a handful of its citizens to emigrate, and the United States eagerly offered admission to most of them. But under Kremlin reforms instituted by Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Moscow has allowed tens of thousands of Jews and other Soviet citizens to emigrate, turning what was once a trickle into an embarrassing surplus.

The number of Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union to all other countries has soared from 8,155 in 1987 to an estimate of more than 48,000 this year--a number far larger than the United States ever planned on aiding financially or accepting as immigrants.

During the current fiscal year, the Administration is accepting 43,500 refugees from the Soviet Union, of whom roughly 33,000 are Jews, officials said. The rest are Pentecostal Christians, who have been persecuted by Soviet authorities in the past, and other political or religious refugees.

In the new fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the Administration plans to fix a ceiling of 50,000 Soviet refugees, of whom 40,000 would be offered financial aid from the government. The other 10,000 would be required to find help from private charities.

“The number of Soviet refugees actually entering the United States will be more or less the same as the current year,” one official predicted. He said it was not certain how many of the 10,000 “unfunded” refugee slots would be used.

The Administration also plans to make most Soviet citizens with no relatives or other ties to the United States ineligible for refugee status, officials said. That restriction already applies to would-be refugees from most other countries, they said; the Soviet Union was made an exception during the years when emigration was tightly restricted.

Financial Restraints

The main restraint on U.S. refugee admissions, officials said, is financial: by granting refugee status to an immigrant, the federal government also makes a commitment to pay the refugee’s transportation and resettlement costs, which average about $7,000 per person. (The average cost for Soviet Jews is somewhat lower, roughly $5,000 per refugee, because they often receive aid from Jewish charities, one official noted.)

This year, the State Department-administered refugee program was budgeted for 112,500 refugee admissions worldwide, a number that had to be divided among the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.

Both houses of Congress have passed bills that would make it easier for Soviet Jews and Christians to win refugee status. The Administration is opposing the bills, which have not reached final passage, because of the new spending they would impose.

A major influence on the Administration’s discussions on Soviet Jewish refugees is the fact that Israel, which has long sought more Jewish immigrants, offers the refugees automatic citizenship and resettlement aid, officials said.

“If someone has a firm resettlement offer in another country, we’d rather make our resources available to other people who don’t have offers,” one official said.

‘Not Doing This for Israel’

Israel has repeatedly pressed the United States to restrict its admissions of Soviet Jewish refugees and redirect the emigrants to the Jewish state. But U.S. officials denied that Israeli pressure was a factor in their decision to hold Soviet refugee admissions to their present level.

“We’re not doing this for Israel,” said one. “We’re just recognizing that Israel is an option for Soviet Jews. If that other option weren’t available, we might take another look.”

“We had several options on how to respond to the increase in applications in the Soviet Union,” he said. “One was to give the Soviet Union a larger share, but that would be a matter of taking numbers away from other areas, basically Southeast Asia. Or we could have increased all allocations proportionally, but we would have had problems staying within our budgetary limits.”