CONFIDENTIAL
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exceptional treatment to the large number of Iranians in this country and have already granted refugee status or political asylum to over 4000 of them. A rough estimate shows that there is a total of some 25,000 Iranians here, large proportion of whom may be anticipated to seek asylum in the near future. And a year in this job has taught me that the next international crisis with its attendant refugee problem is unlikely to be very far away.
Turning from the general to the specific, it is not clear from your paper what size of quota you have in mind. Presumably it would have to be of the order of 1000 or more to have the desired effect. But any quota would cost more money, would be resisted by local authorities and would not be welcomed by the refugee organisations for whom it would be a distraction in dealing with the problems of those already received. It is also worth bearing in mind that the Vietnamese left in Hong Kong are by and large those who have failed to gain admission into other countries, in other words the uneducated and unskilled who present particular problems in assimilation. Finally, there would be a knock-on effect through family reunification cases.
The same objections apply to the proposal to accept boat rescues by Hong Kong registered ships but in this case we would be making an open-ended and unquantifiable commitment - something we should very much wish to avoid. It would breach the principle that flag states should honour their obligations (a principle that the Hong Kong Government has urged other states to uphold) and could set an unwelcome precedent for the future.
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On the face of it relaxed criteria for family reunification would pose less of a problem, at least so far as assimilation is concerned, and it would be welcomed by the refugee agencies. But your paper gives no idea of the likely size of the commitment and this would have to be established before the proposal could be considered further. Even then, I would be none too optimistic given our existing commitment to family reunification and the fact that the Vietnamese concept of the family is a wide one, at complete variance with the narrow concept of the family embodied in the Immigration Rules. We were forced to tighten the criteria adopted for the Vietnamese programme when the numbers involved rose sharply. We also had cases where the relationship to the applicant was in doubt and there is clearly scope for abuse in this area.
We understand that the intention of the offer made by SCF and OV, each to receive 20 children, is that central Government would provide for their upkeep as we do at present for 22 in the care of SCF, and have undertaken to do for a further 10 in OV's care. We would not support admission on this basis. If the agencies are genuinely prepared to sponsor the children and we were satisfied that no family reunification would subsequently be involved however, that would be a different matter. Whether any gesture in this direction would have much impact
on the Hong Kong Government is open to doubt.
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I am sorry that this letter has been so long but I thought it only fair to set out our views in detail. The fact is, however, that I doubt whether any proposal to increase our intake of Vietnamese refugees will appear attractive to a Government firmly committed to reducing the numbers admitted to this country for settlement, especially at a time when new and controversial Immigration Rules are being debated. If, nevertheless, you wish to pursue the recommendations in your paper further, perhaps the best course would be a meeting to establish what common ground there may be.
CONFIDENTIAL
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