Word: asylums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...addition to the argument that our overwhelming guilt requires us to accept all Vietnamese refugees who apply for political asylum. President Ford has put forward an historical argument leading to the same conclusion. Ford claims that America must live up to a tradition of accepting all refugees. His presentation of history, the textbook version, is only half true. While immigration in the nineteenth century was virtually unrestricted, in this century America has only relaxed immigration quotas when refugees from one of our client states, or our allies as we ingenuously call them, were involved. The Cubans but not the Jews...
...power, need not paralyze us into taking no action at all against others responsible, though perhaps responsible on a different level. The argument is especially weak since no direct action against ex-torturers and ex-secret police is being contemplated; the only action recommended is refusing such people political asylum...
...while understanding how precarious an effort it is to avoid sanctimoniousness and racism. Americans should reject the view that these 130,000 refugees form a monolithic bloc of people each with an equal right to political asylum. Some should be denied the security and moral sanction of asylum--secret police who staffed the South Vietnamese torture establishment, guarded the tiger cages and carried out the Phoenix program of assassinations. America has no responsibility to provide a safe haven for these people, and we are in no position ourselves to undertake to rehabilitate them...
...charges that Vietnamese refugees will carry disease. "Spread communism," and possibly flood the job market with cheap labor. It would be better to accept all the refugees than to how to these voices echoing the most disreputable chapters of our history. If we do screen Vietnamese refugees and reject asylum for a few of them, it must be clear that America is not obeying the voice of primitive racism, but making a belated attempt to cease our support of corruption and atrocity...
...problems of refugees waiting to be granted asylum in America must be dealt with immediately. But the American government has no right to distinguish between those refugees who are "qualified" to become U.S. citizens, and those who aren't, between acceptable groups and unacceptable ones. Some of the prostitutes Sen. Byrd feels are "undesirables," for example, became prostitutes precisely because of the war. By the same token, refugees cannot be judged by criteria which separate their politics and actions from the American policies that directed them. The Vietnamee police is one group liable to rejection by the U.S. Their functions...