TNAG-1529-FCO40-2093-Hong-Kong-Vietnamese-refugees-general-1986 — Page 220

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Mr Gorman, the Head of the Refugees and Immigration Section of the Australian MFA, called on me 16 June to discuss refugee questions. He had just been to the informal EXCOM of UNHCR.

2. The main question we discussed, at his request, was that of the type of refugee that we now coming out of Vietnam. He said that as these "refugees" were increasingly such for economic reasons rather than for fear of persecution it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify devoting to them large numbers of resettlement placed in Australia. I pointed out that this did not apply to those refugees in Hong Kong's "Open Camps" as they had arrived before July 1982, nor did it apply to many in the "close camps", some of whom had been in Hong Kong for over 3 years. He took this point but indicated that this question was becoming an increasingly important and difficult one for the major resettlement countries. He indicated that it had formed part of the informal discussions held between the USA, Australia, Candada and UNHCR (the Honolulu group?) while he was in Geneva.

3. As the problem of long-term resettlement prospects for Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong is currently under consideration here, I should be most grateful if you could approach your opposite number in the Australian mission to ascertain what was discussed and what conclusions were reached at this informal meeting.

4.

For your information only, are considering whether there is a need for informal consultations between UNHCR, countries of first asylum and the major resettlement countries on the general problem of refugees, displaced persons and economic migrants in South-East Asia in the longer-term. I should be grateful if your views on whether any existing group (perhaps an expanded Honolulu group?) could/would be prepared to take on this task and whether UNHCR would wish to be associated with it or even to take the lead on it. Our main problem is that, while in the long term we want to discourage "economic refugees" from leaving Vietnam illegally (as opposed to emigrating through the mechanism of ODP) and thereby creating a problem for countries of first refuge (who could not forcibly repatriate them to Vietnam for moral reasons but could not find resettlement places for them in other countries as they were not "mandate refugees"), we do not want to, in focusing on the long-term problem, find ourselves defining those refugees currently

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