Word: though
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dramatic and horrifying though their plight may be, the boat people represent only a fraction of the world's unwanted exiles. Indeed, the age has been called "a century of refugees," because wars and political upheavals and natural disasters like famine and flood have made so many homeless. At the end of World War II, there were 40 million refugees in Europe alone; perhaps the most pitiable were the Jewish survivors of Hitler's Holocaust. At the time of the partition of British India, in 1947, 15 million were dispossessed. In 1950, 5 million North Koreans fled...
...Though they have problems with fleeing refugees of their own, the Chinese angrily rejected Hanoi's claims that the refugees were mostly people escaping from Viet Nam's "socialist transformation." The People's Daily of Peking pointed out that 95% of the 230,000 or so Sino-Vietnamese whom China has admitted in recent months have come from northern Viet Nam, where the Communists took power in 1954. Asked the paper: "How was the [25-year-old] socialist transformation served by dismissing Chinese from their jobs, forcing them to retire, demoting them and reducing their pay, cutting...
...Though they have no constituency, the refugees have sympathizers in many countries. In Paris, Mayor Jacques Chirac proposed that the city charter a ship and a plane to bring 1,500 refugees into France immediately. The motion was finally passed, with abstentions by the Communists, for whom stories of the Vietnamese boat people have become an embarrassment. The people of Iowa have pledged to accept 1,500 refugees for resettlement this year, and are disappointed that transportation for the Vietnamese has not yet been arranged. Says Iowa Refugee Official Richard Whitaker: "We are ready for them and upset that...
...refugees have one important thing going for them: their predecessors, who fled Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, have adjusted well to life in Western Europe and the U.S. Though there have been traces of resentment against them, as there have been against immigrants of the past, the Vietnamese as a group have shown themselves to be hard-working and proudly self-sufficient. According to a new study by the University of Maryland, the Vietnamese employment rate in the U.S. is higher than that of the American population as a whole, and the number of Vietnamese refugees...
...battle the refugees, Hong Kong relies on five aging police launches, 900 members of the British army's Gurkha infantry, 150 British regulars and 90 Hong Kong soldiers. Though Hong Kong is second only to Malaysia in its population of still homeless Vietnamese refugees (nearly 55,000 now live in camps in the colony), officials consider them a lesser problem than the illegal Chinese. Since the Vietnamese usually arrive by boat, the marine police sight them more easily; moreover, many now in Hong Kong will eventually move on to other countries...