The Final Commitment: People

By Thomas Griffith

The Viet Nam War seems endless in its capacity to generate unpleasant surprises. The latest is the unexpected hostility to accepting Vietnamese refugees into the U.S. It has surfaced suddenly with considerable fervor, and for a variety of often contradictory reasons, all over the country. Senator McGovern, the 1972 presidential peace candidate, says: "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Viet Nam, including the orphans." The manager of a John Birch Society bookstore near the new refugee tent city at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida is afraid of "tropical diseases floating around." Right-wingers worry that there might be Communists among the refugees; those who opposed the war suspect that too many are corrupt generals and profiteering businessmen who were able to push or bribe their way to safety.

America's unemployed see new rivals for scarce jobs. A Gallup poll last week found 54% of all Americans opposed to admitting Vietnamese refugees to live in the U.S., and only 36% in favor.

The refugees themselves, with their Leatherette suitcases and string-tightened plastic bags--those who were privileged and got reserved seats, those who scrambled and were saved--are so motley and undefinable that some among them can be used to prove any argument, except the one about communicable diseases, which inspection shows them not to have. They include those who bribed their way out; those who made quick marriages--as well as those who mastered English and technical knowledge and worked for IBM or the Department of Defense or Chase Manhattan; those who are trained doctors or pharmacists; those who out of religious belief or political conviction made themselves early enemies of the new regime; those whose service in the Vietnamese army or government or whose working for the U.S. guaranteed their arrest, their "re-education," or in some cases their death. Most, though they looked as ragtag as any fleeing refugee, are urban and middleclass.

Few freedom trains greet them with welcome flags flying. Yet it could be said that those Vietnamese also chose freedom, much like those who by a similar tangle of fears, principles and ambitions were among the 400,000 mostly Eastern European refugees admitted to the U.S. after World War II, the 38,000 who fled here after the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and the 650,000 mostly middle-class Cubans who escaped or left Castro's Cuba.

As John Kennedy said, the U.S. is a nation of immigrants; since 1820, when the Government first began keeping score, nearly 50 million have been admitted. Since the first census of 1790 (which showed a population roughly 75% of British origin), there have been vast waves of immigrants, and sometimes counterwaves of hostility, which surfaced in the Know-Nothing anti-foreign agitations of the 1850s and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the 1840s and 1850s, hundreds of thousands of Germans fled poverty and political unrest; nearly a million Irish came after the potato famine; the biggest wave (nearly 8 million) swept over Ellis Island from Hungary, Italy and Russia between 1901 and 1910. Though Americans have long prided themselves on their open hospitality, as the land has filled up they have more closely guarded the door. They have set quotas, preferring to admit those with ties to people already here. But stirred by resistance to tyranny, or moved by those--in Eastern Europe, Cuba or elsewhere--who might have counted on American encouragement, they have always made exceptions. On such grounds, the South Vietnamese plainly qualify.

Choosing freedom, that resounding propaganda phrase, is of course not heard much this time. In the disillusioned aftermath of Viet Nam, such self-congratulatory patriotic talk does not have much resonance. Or is the difference in the fact that the new refugees are Asians? Some among the Vietnamese wives of American G.I.s who arrived here earlier and encountered prejudice and resentment think so. Prejudice certainly exists; yet nearly half a million Asians were admitted legally to the U.S. in the 1960s, and another 90,000 last year. Even the understandable recession worries about competing job seekers could not account for all the hostility. -

The explanation must be that the refugees constitute 120,000 reminders of a country--and a war--that the U.S. seems determined to forget as quickly as possible. After Congress turned down President Ford's bill to provide $327 million to resettle the refugees, the President's response was to condemn the vote as "not worthy of a people" raised on Emma Lazarus' moving invitation to the Old World's "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Yet Americans have been buffeted lately by confusing admonitions from on high. Only three weeks ago, the President blamed Congress for not keeping America's commitment, and admired Moscow and Peking for keeping theirs. As Saigon was collapsing and more than a billion dollars worth of U.S.-supplied guns, planes and tanks were abandoned, he pleaded that $722 million more could "stabilize the military situation." It could not have, of course, and a week later Ford proclaimed the war "finished as far as America is concerned," and urged no recriminations.

Yet of course the war is not really finished as far as America is concerned--and here come the 120,000 reminders. The reception they get, after the first picketing dies down, will in fact be one indicator of what kind of people Americans are. One of the difficulties about democracy is that when its leadership is confused, divided or uncertain, then the demonstrations and fury of a few can be taken as the will of the many. Even Abraham Lincoln, that most convinced of democrats, argued that all the people can be fooled (or confused) some of the time: it was democracy's long-run judgment that he would bet on. He lived in an age when rhetoric had not yet been debased. "Peace with honor" was invoked to justify the Christmas bombing of North Viet Nam; "commitment" has become a disputed phrase about what Richard Nixon did or did not promise Saigon. But surely peace with honor includes a refuge for those who, with or without a proper, binding legal commitment, trusted the U.S. for so many years.

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