RN / BRE (Am) tile.
24 MAY 1995
March 1985
$1.00
INDOCHINA IINA ISSUES 55
U.S. Refugee Policy: Coping With Migration
Growing numbers of people are leaving Indochina to find a better life elsewhere. There is nothing wrong with such movements, but economic migrants must be treated differently from refugees. Otherwise, we risk eroding the protection offered to refugees.
Jerry M. Tinker
The headlines today from Southeast Asia-parti- cularly from Cambodia-remind even those who seek to forget that the human tragedy and political dilemmas, which emerged in the wake of America's long involve- ment in the region, continue unabated. Indeed, they have hardly changed over the past decade.
Viewers of the award-winning film, The Killing Fields, may leave the theater with a powerful image of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge, but probably not know. that America's foreign policy today helps support their continued existence. Who could have imagined in 1975, as helicopters lifted from our embassy in Phnom Penh, that the United States would today be one of the principal supporters of Pol Pot's regime at the United Nations?
As reports from the Thai-Cambodian border confirm, the bloody "killing fields" continue, and there seems to be no end in sight to the suffering of the Khmer people. They remain pawns in regional and great power struggles which they have no real control over and barely under- stand.
It gives one an acute sense of deja vu to hear the cries from some conservatives, as well as liberals, that the United States should again militarily intervene, by providing weapons, or at least supporting a Chinese offensive against Vietnam.
A decade after the fall of Saigon, the humanitarian problems confronting the people of Indochina persist. Throughout the region, there is continuing conflict and political upheaval, producing an outflow of refugees and
migran's which challenges the capacity of the interna- tional community and taxes the tolerance of Southeast Asian nations.
While the flow of "boat people" from Vietnam has diminished in recent years, the total movement of people remains large. For every 10 Vietnamese “boat people" the United States and other countries resettled in 1984, eight more came out of Vietnam to take their place. This year threatens the same trend. If direct departures through the Orderly Departure Program are included in the figure, the total outflow has in fact increased-and this does not take into account the continuing Laotian and Khmer refugee populations in Thailand.
What started out between 1975 and 1981 as a genuine refugee flow has slowly but clearly shifted to a migratory flow now composed of some refugees, a growing number of family reunification cases, and an ever larger economic migrant component. Unless the international community comes to grips with this fundamental shift, we are likely to see an unfortunate end to what has been a very
Jerry M. Tinker is the minority counsel on the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Policy and an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Tinker most recently visited refugee camps in Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong in July 1984. This article is adapted from his trip report to the subcommittee, entitled, "Refugee and Migration Problems in Southeast Asia."
A publication of the Center for International Policy, Indochina Project
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