Immigrants Find Old Ally Blocking Path

Buu Phan and his wife, Ngoc Ly, arrived from Vietnam on Nov. 17. There were no parades to trumpet their arrival. No welcome signs stretched across the airport tarmac. Still, when Buu finally got off the plane, his impulse was to get down on one knee and touch the ground he had waited so many years to feel.

For almost 40 of his years, ever since he first took an English class taught by an American from the U.S. Information Agency, Buu’s fate has been closely tied to the United States, like in a marriage, for better or for worse.

I met Buu and Ngoc Ly in December when they arrived in my English class at the West Valley Occupational Center in Woodland Hills. After class one day, Buu told me a little about his history and about his problem.

From 1966 to 1975 Buu was a captain in the South Vietnamese army. For nine years he fought beside his American counterparts in what he believed was a battle for liberation from Communist oppressors. In 1975 he and America lost that war. The difference was that America was not sent to prison as a result.

On the day the war ended, Buu’s five children ranged in age from 6 months to 7 years. For the next 6 1/2 years, while Buu did his time at a Communist re-education camp in Hanoi, his children grew up without a father, in a country where women do not have equal employment opportunities and where there are no government handouts for single parents or their children.

For more than six years, Buu did not see his wife or children. While he was away, Ngoc Ly made ends meet as best she could by working seven days a week at whatever she could find to do. For most of that time she worked as a storekeeper in a small brewery, and on the weekends she traveled to the provinces where she could buy rice a little cheaper than what it sold for in Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. In the city she sold the rice for a minuscule profit. Somehow they survived.

Even after his release from prison, Buu, then 43, was never able to find a real job. And although he was an educated man, a hospital administrator before the war, he was no longer employable in Ho Chi Minh City. He came home from prison to an impoverished family, and all he could do to help them was the same small-time buying and selling of rice that Ngoc Ly had been doing in his absence.

When the Vietnamese government finally decided to open the doors for emigration to the United States, it was one of Buu’s happiest days. He went to the government immigration office, stood in line for more than 10 hours and got an application. Unfortunately, the application required a fee. For Buu, who had almost no money, the wait from application to exit interview took more than six years.

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While Buu waited, two things happened. First, his children grew older. By the time they were authorized to leave the country, in 1995, they were young adults. And in April 1995, something else happened: a small but significant change in U.S. immigration policy regarding Vietnamese refugees.

It wasn’t well publicized. I was teaching English in the Refugee Employment Training Project, which has its classroom space at West Valley Occupational Center. Many of my students were Vietnamese, but I didn’t read or hear anything about the policy change. But under the new policy, only children younger than 21 would be permitted to accompany their parents into this country. Adult children, after April 1995, were no longer eligible.

In Vietnam today, Buu’s sons and daughters are working. Two are silk-screen printers and two are assemblers in a neon-light factory. The highest salary among them is $60 a month, enough to survive there, but little more. Politically and economically, in Vietnam their future is limited.

In Los Angeles, Buu and Ngoc Ly take English classes, morning afternoon and evening. But they are no longer young, and the future they want, the opportunities they fought for, were opportunities for their children. For Buu and Ngoc Ly, there is no future without their sons and daughters.

There is an anti-immigrant wind blowing around this country today, as it has blown periodically throughout our history. On March 22 the House passed a sweeping bill aimed at illegal immigrants. And now, in both houses of Congress, there are bills under consideration that would target legal immigrants as well. Bills that would forever slam the door on Buu’s sons and daughters and others like them.

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Buu’s problem is not with his old enemy, the Communist government in Hanoi. It has issued the passports and approved the applications. Buu’s problem today is with his old ally, us, the United States.

America abandoned him once. Common decency requires that, as the anti-immigrant gusts swirl, we not leave his children out in the cold again.