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be believed if they were
they were obtained.
The poor state of our relations
wi th Vietnam will contribute to these difficulties. Finally a
decision to treat some boat people as economic migrants rather than refugees would be a break with the unwritten understanding reached
at the 1979 conference that all boat-people should be treated as
refugees (however in practice it is clear that several other
governments concerned have already concluded that many of the people concerned are economic migrants rather than refugees).
B. Options designed to increase the rate of departures
19. (a) Voluntary repatriation to Vietnam
UNHCR consider voluntary repatriation to be the mos t desirable solution to refugee problems. We agree. Not suprisingly, there have been few volunteers for repatriation to Vietnam. Of the 20 who have so far applied from Hong Kong, 14 have returned to Vietnam; the
other six applications are still pending. In response to an
approach from Mr Hartling in September 1984, the Vietnamese said
that there was no reason why Vietnam should take back Vietnamese who
did not wish to participate in the work of reconstruction and who left Vietnam, although they
they were prepared to consider applications
on a case-by-case basis. This augurs badly for any large scale repatriation to Vietnam; and there are not in any case likely to be
many more volunteers.
(b) Local absorption
UNHCR also favour settlement in the country of first
first asylum. Hong Kong has absorbed 14,500 displaced Indo-Chinese, mostly from Vietnam, since 1975. Hong Kong's relative wealth might be cited as
a reason to take a greater number of Vietnamese. But the territory
is already densely populated; it has had to deal with enormou s
immigration from China in the same period and Chinese legal immigrants still number
still number over 27,000 a year. The people of Hong Kong would be unlikely to welcome Vietnamese immigration while illegal immigrants from China are being repatriated daily. There is always the danger that further absorption by Hong Kong would trigger more
departures from Vietnam. Nevertheless, if the flow of Vietnamese
arrivals can be slowed and an adequate way found to deal with future
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