D Tonkin Esq CMG HANOI
CONFIDENTIAL
Foreign and Commonwealth Office
London SW1A 2AH
16 March 1982
See(41
Hkk 243
But do we
want Kun?
Dear Devela
THE OUTFLOW FROM VIETNAM
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Трось
1. Thank you for your letter of 2 March, which gives me useful up to date background for a short visit to the region on which I am about to embark (to Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei and Thailand).
WP
2. In the eight months since your last substantive report on the outflow (your teleletter 243/4 of 29 June 1981 to me), the overall picture has remained pretty static, and early 1982 figures for arrivals and offtake contain no real surprises. The main change has been (with the exception of the larger French programme) a continuing gradual drop in resettlement offers and a parallel tightening of resettlement criteria, to the extent that at least one of the most pilloried of the famous 'pull factors' - large and well publicised US quotas must now be disposed of to the satisfaction of its critics. There has also been the hint from Thailand of a potentially important change in the line of first asylum countries away from their demands for the fastest possible resettlement of all arrivals to a readiness to see new arrivals detained indefinitely and denied access to resettlement. just, in due course, link up with a formal vetting procedure to identify the 'classic' refugee who is personally suffering from persecution on an identifiable basis - UNHCR have already informally floated such an idea in the Hong Kong context.
A
This might
you may think
3. We still however remain vigorously stubbornly agnostic about the contribution of the so called 'pull' factors to the outflow, and therefore about the impact of their denial/withdrawal on future movements. If the key communication channel is now that between successful migrants amd their families back home, my guess is that the current tightening up of resettlement procedure will soon begin to get back on the grapevine as have the stories of the occasional refugee who now regrets his move (your paragraph 7) and may even have returned chastened from Hong Kong. But it does demand in first asylum country a readiness not to panic in the period when numbers arriving start to exceed those leaving
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CONFIDENTIAL
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