After the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, President Gerald Ford established the Interagency Task Force for Indochinese Refugee Resettlement under Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Members included with Defense Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, and Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Caspar Weinberger, as members along with the attorney general and the Director of Central Intelligence.
Ambassador L. Dean Brown was appointed the head of the task force staff to which I was assigned by Secretary Schlesinger to help coordinate the movement from the Western Pacific to the United States of over more than 125,000 Indochinese refugees consisting of Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and Hmong. Erich von Marbod from Defense, Frank Wisner from State, Julia Taft from HEW, along with representatives from Justice and the CIA constituted the senior staff.
We went to work in the State Department operations center the next night, sleeping on cots and working around the clock to begin coordinating the Hherculean effort by the Defense Department to carefully, but as quickly as possible, move the surging population of refugees from Vietnam and surrounding countries into temporary centers in Guam and the Philippines and, eventually, into the US.
Within days we identified locations for resettlement centers in the US in California (Camp Pendleton), Florida (Eglin Air Force bBase), Arkansas (Fort Chaffee) and Pennsylvania (Fort Indiantown Gap). Over the next month we opened each of those centers in sequence, ending with Fort Indiantown Gap.
We also began immediately working with the key congressional committees. We negotiated what became the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act, which was signed on May 23, 1975, and allocated funding of $305 million for the Department of State and $100 million for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. This The act financed the transportation, processing, reception and resettlement costs of more than 130,000 Vietnamese and others who had been were evacuated during Operation Frequent Wind and who were granted parole by the attorney general to enter the United States.
Besides just managing the care and feeding of an ever increasing population of refugees and the logistics inherent in such an operation, we also recognized the importance of controlling the entry and processing of the refugees in a manner consistent with our humanitarian values as a nation, but also as well as our obligation to screen for health problems. and to check We also checked the backgrounds of these refugees to be careful not to admit on a permanent basis those determined to be undesirable.
Bringing the nation's immigration and asylum system into the 20th century was no mean feat as such a "legal" influx of people had never before occurred. IBM stepped up to transform a hitherto paper-based system into a computer-based system wherein all available records (classified and unclassified) were carefully integrated in such a way as to determine the "goodness" of an individual as an asylum seeker eligible for resettlement in this country.
Temporarily holding these refugees in the resettlement centers while they were processed afforded us the time to determine their eligibility as well as work with the NGOs and religious- and immigration-based organizations to find appropriate resettlement opportunities across our nation.
It was an operation never before attempted, and yet, an operation that ultimately was successful in no small measure because of the hard work of the military and a handful of federal bureaucrats, and the outpouring of heartfelt support from thousands of churches and everyday Americans across the country.
The results now 40forty years later are clear in every way as the children and grandchildren of those courageous refugees have contributed in so many ways to the cultural vibrancy and intellectual and economic strength of our nation. They choose freedom and they have proved their worth.
It should also be noted that in 1980, President Jimmy Carter, when faced with some 125,000 Cubans fleeing the Castro regime as part of the Mariel boatlift, selected Fort Chaffee again as a resettlement center. And among that refugee population were thousands of criminals released from Cuban jails.
Fort Chaffee once again provided a "controlled" environment at which these refugees could be appropriately screened for "eligibility" and those who qualified were eventually resettled into American society.
We can do this again with a much smaller number of Syrian refugees if the president, and the Congress and the private sector set their minds to do it as we did 35 and 40 years ago.
Raymond DuBois is a senior adviser for the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
