CONFIDENTIAL
5. In view of these facts, it became clear that the essential need is for an early approach to the Treasury to ask if sufficient funds can be made available to the voluntary agencies to help with resettling, say 500 extra Vietnamese refugees. (In this context, it was suggested that £150,000 would cover the resettlement of up to 500 refugees). From his previous experience with Latin American refugees, the Home Office representative recommended an approach from the Home Secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer: this would ensure an early decision from the Treasury. Consequently, the meeting decided that UND should submit to the Secretary of State and recommend that he write to Mr Rees, putting forward an urgent plea on behalf of Hong Kong. This submission will be cleared with the relevant departments.
6.
Additionally, as this problem is likely to continue - the Vietnamese regime has shown no indication of changing its present policies - it was agreed that we shall also need to consider a long-term solution to cover the whole of South-East Asia. This is likely to take the form of our widening the present criteria under which we accept Vietnamese refugees into this country (currently we demand a UK connection and a sponsor in this country). We could, for example, demand only a working knowledge of English on the part of the head of the family. However, the Home Office would not wish to introduce any form of numerical quota such as exists in the United States and in Canada and, therefore, deciding on any new criteria which we might demand is a delicate matter.
7 September 1978
Roland Strappy
CR Stagg
Hong Kong & General Department
the heir
I must confess to misgivings about the way this is developing: the immediate problem is to help Hong Kong relieve the acute pressure on their facilities by or agreeing to take a token mumber of refugees, in the hope that this would encourage other countries to be more generous (and also to put us in a better position, morally, to exert pressure on those countries). The procedure out lined a love
a hand some response at the end of the day, but I have the feeling it is going to take time and this be no help in the immediate crisis. But let us see the draft submission when
it comes.
may
enable us to
give
2. I wonder whether canybody has considered whether UNHCR can help meet the costs of the refugees in the UK. They seem able to pay for them in Hong Kong (we must remember in fact that Hong Kong's "liberal" policy is costing them nothing), and we seem to be able to find the money to contribute generoush to UNHCR - why cannot some of that money be diverted to pay for the refugees here (since that seems to be the only constraint on this
CONFIDENTIAL Coming here)?
W.E. Quantill