Somebody has to pay them. What this amendment does is to call for plain equity in deciding who should pay those costs. We have heard a lot today about refugees. and most or all of it is true. Today. we are faced with a most unusual flow of refugees into the United States. particularly from Southeast Asia. Not long ago. our administration announced a policy. which we are now following. It is in being. the policy of receiving approximately 14.000 refugees per month from Southeast Asia. Fourteen thousand refugees per month is an awful lot. That is 470 every day of the year. That is 168.000 every year. without regard to the other immigrants or refugees who come to our shores. As of November 15. 1979. just 1 month ago. the figures which are the most recent that I have been able to obtain show that we thena month agohad 267.102 refugees in the United States who have come in from Vietnam and Southeast Asia. If we add another 14.000 to that. because that is the formula under which they arrive. we now have 281.000 Southeast Asian refugees in the United States. Now comes the matter of plain equity. Somebody has to pay the cost of assimilating these refugees. Bear in mind that these refugees. most of them. are illiterate in their own language. They are unskilled and unemployed in their own economy. They are in large part uncultured in their own culture. and without a place in their own society. Obviously. the job of assimilating these refugees into our modem American culture. our modern American society. and our modern American economy. is a massive job. Think of the cost. What job do you have to offer to someone whose highest degree of technology has been to follow a water buffalo through a rice paddy during 35 or 40 years of his life?
Identified stereotypes
Generalization about Southeast Asian refugees being illiterate, unskilled, unemployed, and uncultured.