1
The Jubilee
camp has been difficult to run in the
past, mainly because the rate
of
resettlement from it has
been very low. All the refugees living there are ethnic
South Vietnam, usually of rural and poor
Vietnamese
educational background; and many of
of their cases have been
looked at by at least one
resettlement country and
however, UNHCR has been
rejected. Since December 1984
conducting a special campaign to increase resettlement
from Jubilee, with the aim of substantially reducing the
This has had some success, but the
camp population.
population still stands at 2,200.
On the general question of resettlement from Hong
Kong, Ms Goodrum i s correct in her understanding that the
UK has agreed to accept some 500 Vietnamese re fugees for
This decision was announced in the White
resettlement.
Paper which the
Government published on 26
September in
response to the recent report of the Home Affairs Sub-
Committee on Race Relations and Immigration (SCORRI),
"Refugees and Asylum with
Special Reference to the
Vietnamese". Most of the refugees will come from camps
in Hong Kong (a few will come from other places of
of first
asylum in South East Asia)
•
They all have relatives in
the UK, but their cases would normally have fallen
outside the Home Office's immigration criteria for family
reunion cases.
Altogether some 19,000 Indo-Chinese
refugees, including over 12,000 from Hong Kong, have been
resettled in the UK since 1975.