:
13,500 are refugees and the bulk of the remainder await screening. Results of the screening process (which is supervised by UNHCR) have
indicated that 90% of new arrivals are economic migrants.
At the International Conference on Indo-Chinese Regugees in Geneva
in June, all countries of first asylum agreed to introduce
screening, thus ending the era of automatic resettlement.
As part
of this process, Britain undertook to settle a further 2000 refugees
from Hong Kong. Resettlement countries pledged to resettle all the Vietnamese refugees in the South east Asian Region over the next
three years. It was agreed that all those screened out, as economic migrants, should return to Vietnam. But there remains the problem
of how to achieve this in practice. The Geneva Conference agreed
that a voluntary programme should be tried in the first instance, but results from Hong Kong have so far been disappointing: only 263
volunteers have returned so far. Since Geneva the British
Government have been working to secure arrangements which would
enable those boat people who do not qualify as refugees and have no prospect of resettlement to return to Vietnam without fear of persecution.