Speech #960173217

Mr. Speaker. refugees tug at our hearts. The Vietnamese and Cambodians have our continuing concern. Their very existence demands that Americans respond. do something. do anything. We have rushed a bill to the House floor. H.R. 2816. the Refugee Act of 1979. that will do something about the boat people. But pressed by the urgency of need of the Indochinese. we have not paused to consider the other implications of the refugee bill. and we have not faced what the bill will do besides provide some immediate relief for the Indochinese. When H.R. 2816 was first proposed. it was believed that there would be about 50.000 refugees a year needing shelter in the United States. Today. a few months later. there are already hundreds of thousands of refugees. and the United States is pledged to take 14.000 a month for an indefinite period. The rest of the world. today almost completely closed to immigrants in general. is responding in a grudging and inadequate way. Japan plans to take no more than a hundred in total. France. England. the rest of the world including South America and Africa. will take several thousand people. no more. There would be problems. these nations say. in accepting refugees. And they all look to America. America is the land of the refugee. says the rest of the world. and the large majority of the boat people say they want to go to America. In Vietnam. America learned that it cannot be the worlds policeman. From the Vietnamese. we also have to learn that we cannot be the worlds refuge. The problem is too big. Aside from the boat people. the United Nations has determined that there are 14 million refugees in the world today. Freedom House lists 630 million people with a national consciousness who have no nation of their own. 117.5 million of them have a high national consciousness and live in nations that are not free. They are part of the potential refugees of tomorrow. part of the millions that we can predict with certainty will be homeless as Asian. African. and Latin American countries abuse their minorities and expel them as scapegoats for the failures of totalitarian regimes. And where will most of these people want to go?