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collation had to be sent back to the voluntary agencies in the United States who alone were responsible for settlement. The agencies had to get a sponsor and then the case was referred back to Hong Kong. The problem of "building the pipeline" was considerable both in Hong Kong and elsewhere. (For example they had been able to take only 401 out of the 1,000 from Indonesia in July). A further problem arose from the fact that in the process of medical screening 8% of all those examined turned out to have a health problem (he mentioned TB, VD and even leprosy). If one assumed that a health problem for one member of a family effectively held up the whole family that meant that 40% of all candidates for resettlement were being put on "medical hold". So the number of dossiers needed to reach the ceiling in any month was that ceiling plus 40%.
7. They were also concerned about Indonesia which had experienced a very large inflow during July with people being pushed on from Malaysia. They feared that if the numbers went up too quickly the Indonesians would be tempted to reject the policy of first asylum; this argued for a continuing attempt by the US to keep the numbers down. Clark said that he personally would like to cut back significantly the offtake from Malaysia because the Malaysians were still pushing boats off. But the fact was that they had to do their best to meet President Carter's ceiling of 14,000 per month and it so happened that in Malaysia alone there was a large accumulation of pre-processed biographies; this explained the high offtake of 5,590 during July.
8. For Hong Kong, he certainly hoped that in August it would be possible to reach the 1,500 ceiling plus the unused backlog from July. He foresaw no problem in reaching 2,000 during September. Later in the day Holbrooke asked why HMG could not do even more. You stressed the very great effort that we had made in meeting the UNHCR's recommendation. We also drew attention to the very credible perfor- mance by the UK if one looked at the figures for cumulative resettlement destinations for Vietnamese in Hong Kong during 1979 (Hong Kong telegram No 1117) and to the high incidence of asylees from all sources now resident in the UK (calculated by the Home Office to be 2.5 per thousand head of population). Holbrooke defended the US position on the ground that the United States had to take refugees from other South East Asian countries, whereas HMG had made it clear that their only obligation was to Hong Kong.
9. There was also discussion of the possibility of expanding the existing 7-point programme agreed with Vietnam. The question arose of how to avoid queue jumping. Clark observed that it was difficult to take the position that the existing moratorium by itself was sufficient, and yet if one went beyond family reunion cases there was a danger of digging into the quotas available for those already scattered about South East Asia. Vietnam had a strong lever available in terms of the threat to reopen the exodus. He was inclined to aim for some expansion beyond family reunion, with the hope that the extra refugees involved could then go straight to reprocessing centres. Later in the day on this same point, Holbrooke made it clear that he
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