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As to the future, the main question mark still hangs over US intentions. As you know, an Immigration and Naturalisation team went round the camps in May and screened 3,750 refugees. At first they thought they had identified 560 candidates for entry to the US and gave them papers accordingly. Unfortunately, they then realised that they had been applying the wrong criteria and only 200 of the 560 were eligible. In the end, we warned against trying to withdraw these papers, they re-screened all the possible cases and ultimately 1,141 were given conditional approval for entry to the US pending verification of their claims. Most of June passed and the Americans only took out 77 refugees, 67 of whom had arrived by air prior to the "CLARA MAERSK" and were mainly connected with Air America. But following the visit of Bumgardner of the US Task Force, the American Consul-General here was able to announce publicly that the US would grant parole and entry into America for a very large number of the refugees in Hong Kong. He repeated this assurance, again publicly, at the end of June and added that the US would begin moving large numbers of refugees from Hong Kong in the near future. Since then, another 50 refugees have been flown out by the Americans, but there is still no sign of any large scale exodus. For instance, only 98 are currently awaiting medical examinations to go to the US and those who have already left were apparently connected with a Congressman who had agreed to pay their fares and house them. Nevertheless, we are still getting optimistic noises from the Consulate-General. For instance, the Deputy Consul-General told Alan Donald before he left that the Americans were close to moving the eleven hundred odd refugees whom they had screened earlier to camps in the US and Hong Kong would be given priority. Moreover, after this batch had left, there were good hopes that American would take "a very substantial number" of the residue in Hong Kong as well. There is a further team made up of Immigration and Naturalisation Service, State Department and Task Force officials apparently like to come to Hong Kong before the end of the month, but until this log-jam can be broken, it is difficult for us to make any very concrete plans for the future.
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Meanwhile, the refugees themselves have been lobbying the US President, Congress and Senate with various representations. Although not entirely dispirited, they had been keyed up to expect a greater degree of movement to America, especially since the US Consul-General's speech and are bewildered by the remaining uncertainty. A number of the prospective candidates for the US have been restive and caused us minor security problems.
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On the Canadian front, small groups are still moving to Canada and a number of further applications are being considered. The Canadians reckon that they may be
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