CONFIDENTIAL
9.
Resettlement
quotas for all Indo-Chinese refugees have declined
in recent years. Hong Kong has been particularly affected by this
decline. Reasons for the decline appear to include:
(a)
"Compassion Fatigue"
Nearly 10 years after the fall of Saigon, the Indo-Chinese refugee
problem is perceived as less pressing than it was and has been
overtaken by other refugee crises, eg Iran, Afghanistan, and
Ethiopia.
(b) Domestic considerations of resettlement countries
Many resettlement countries are reluctant to accept large quotas of
refugees because they already face high unemployment, and
concerned about the strain that large numbers of unemployed refugees
might place on welfare services. The UK has had one of the least
satisfactory experiences in this respect: 80% of the adult (male?)
Vietnamese resettled here are unemployed.
(c) Reluctance to accept
to accept "non-refugees"
The Americans in particular support the view that the majority of
the refugees now arriving in Hong Kong are economic migrants. Since
mid-1982 (when statistics were first made available to the Hong Kong
Government by the US Government) about 50% of those selected by the
US Consulate in Hong Kong as eligible for admission under the US
Refugee Programme have subsequently been rejected by the Immigration
and Naturalisation Service on the grounds that they are not
refugees.
(d) View that UK should take the lead in resettling refugees from
Hong Kong
The main reason why Hong Kong has been more affected by the decline
in resettlement offers than other places of first asylum appears to
be simply that other countries consider that the UK, as the
metropolitan power, should take the lead in accepting a further
quota from Hong Kong. Evidence of this is set out in the attached
extract from the Memorandum which we submitted in October 1984 to
SCORRI. Further remarks similar to those in the Memorandum were
made by US, Australian and UNHCR officials to the Hong Kong Government official who attended the Executive committee meeting of
CONFIDENTIAL
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