Transcripts For CSPAN3 Origins Of The Refugee Act Of 1980 20

Lets get started again. We will start with the first panel, and i will introduce the moderator and then she going to introduce the panelists. Honored to introduce to you monica stanky who is with the raven group. She is a nationally known expert on Immigration Law and policy. I know monica from her time on the judiciary committee, the house judiciary committee, where she focused on immigration and refugee issue, but i also know monica for another reason. Her father was a refugee from uganda resettled to new orleans by hius, my organization. Monica. Thank you very much, and thank you for being here, and thank you to mark, and for putting on this wonderful event. As mark said, my father was resettled by hius in 1972 and so i have a personal connection and as counsel on the judiciary committee, it is wonderful to be here. Today we want to diverge from the standup panel, and we want to have two wonderful speakers today and look at how the refugee act came to be and then take a step back to look at sort of where we are today and sort of see if there are any lessons that we can learn from that time and how we can move forward as the morning speakers talked about sort of at a difficult time that we are in right now for the United States Refugee Resettlement, and what lessons we can also take from a difficult time. So i will with that, i will let skip begin to introduce himself and give a brief remark. Im skip endres and i was chief counsel to the immigration subcommittee for 25 years and spent 25 years on capitol hill working for legislative giants like representative holtzman and john dingle. So i retired from there and went off to join the private sector the work with railroads, but i wanted to thank mark and hius to invite me to participate. It is a honor to join distinguished speakers and panelists, because i have known them for a long time and these are some of the finest Public Servants that i have ever met. My first introduction to hius came some 40 years ago, as i was telling you last night, mark. And so i had just been hired by a Committee Chairman emanuel seller who had been the chairman of the committee for some 22 years at this point, and been in congress for 48 years. One day he called me into his office and he was always recalling stories about his times with coolidge and hoover and so as it turned out, he was being honored that weekend by hius and he asked me to write him some remarks. So being a dutiful staffer i researched hius and his activities and i found out that it was a wonderful organization dealing with refugees around the world and i learned that firsthand. I think that i mentioned it to you, mark, last night, that i learned firsthand relationships with carl glick and other advisers i later had when i would hit thorny issues, i could get sage advice and always on point. That is the first assignment. The Second Research was that he was legendary for his battled with senator mccarthy and roosevelt over the restrictions imposed over the holocaust, and the most important thing that i learned in the research is that he delivered the maiden speech on the house floor opposing the measure brought up by ambassador peters. And this is coming from a guy of another person. And so southern europe, and if you were like me, you would have been fine, but if you were from Southeast Asia or elsewhere, forget about it. The system was very unfair. And so for the first time refugees were from all over the world. And the 1965 act was a tough thing to pull off, and as i understand they were able to stack the committee with all of the lbj allies to get that legislation removed. The reason i mentioned it is because all of that was with based on the cold war mentality and other things, and reinforced in the famous mccarron walter act in 1982 changed that perpetuated act. And so it was finally eliminated. The reason i mention it is to show that there was a restrictionist mentality through the 50s and 60s and even into the 70s where the place of birth and things like that would determine what would happen to you if you were an immigrant or refugee. And so they had increased the conditional entrants, and in addition to that, there were both emergency Parole Authority, and that is the basically the mechanism, because there was no basis in the law otherwise. And the refugee crisis had no basis in law, because it was an administrative system that what was brought up in the 1960s with the cubans affected the soviet jews and we had the first attorney general who was the first to command that Patrol Authority of the soviet jews, and then you get into the situation of the boat lift exodus act that was in place at that time to take care of some of issues. But it was always a conflict between the executive and legislative branches of government over who had power over the laws, and that persists to this day as we know. It is very clear that congress enjoyed the plenary power. You can see them coming up out of the upper court, and the Circuit Court saying that it is the president who has that authority. So that is going to continue to go on. During our time both in the soviet jewish time, jim will testify to this as well, it is something that we enjoyed a collaborate power through the indochina access, and the executive and the president s team and the legislative, and there was a complete and continuous consultation of the two levels between the two and between the ford, and the reagan and the carter years, the progress worked. Yes, disagreement, and jim can testify that it was a system of give and take. It was tortuous process. Which continued through the geneva meeting. But what i wanted to mention is two things quickly and then ill stop. This is of significant importance and one was 1972. Liz was the youngest female member of congress at this time, and so we had the longest running member of the house of representatives and so liz came in and joined the subcommittee, and we spent quite a few years on the subcommittee, and as she said over here from 1979 to 1981, and that is when all of this took place. Liz came in and we were off to do the refugee act. She needed a systemic and orderly system for handling the bifurcated refugee problem. Before that, it wias ad hoc, an sometimes the response to an emergency crisis. She recognized the definition was not the same as the u. N. Definition, and she wanted to make sure that the ideology, geography, and none of those things came into play, and that it was a fair and humane process to eliminate the idea that you had to be from a communistdominated country to quali qualify. And so created the office of refugees and resettlement. And also, jim can testify to that, you have had all of the people coming from the South China Sea in boats, and nobody wanted to settle the refugees. So within a month following the appropriations act to coordinate between the admission and the resettlement side but also to make sure that we could fund the problem. So they took care of the programs and then off and running, and to that extent the refugee act was a milestone. Co talk in more detail about the refugee issues. And that is a clear establishment and what i was thinking about today is so much has been helped and so much has not. I was part of the beginning prock willmati proclamation, and they were collaborate. Yes. And so it was precarter, and you can say it is because of the president , but it has really been a slow diverted issue. And so what is fascinating to me is how much is similar and how much is different. Another thing that i am reflecting about is the father who was resettled by hius, and how a number of his immigration documents we were able to find his parole paper and i as a member of the House Judicial Committee pasted it up on the door, because i had not seen that document in so many years, and so it was in responding to some tof of issues. I would like for you to introduce yourself and talk about your role with the refugee act of 1980. Yes. I was designated by secretary christopher to leave a really Good State Department and go up to the Refugee Bureau which was a very not desirable place to go at that time. The Refugee Bureau had modified the antideficiency act, and there were multiple agencies investigating them. And in june of 1979 was clearly difficult for our government. We had so many different refugees coming in, and they could stay in the asylum camps, and the asean countries had declared that there would no longer be a need for them. And thailand and there were 40,000 cambodians crossing the border. And that is part of what was happening that month. So i was told to try to take the remnants of the Old Organization and institute something that worked. I didnt particularly want anything to do with it, but i said that i would be a good soldier. So i went up and read all of the reports, and from the committees on the refugee act. There was one where the secretary for hew, and the discussion between the members and joe califano was dont you think that it would be better to take the state departments domestic Resettlement Department and take it to hew. So i went back home and looked on my desk of the judiciary report on the house subcommittee on approapriations say that we take the programs and the relief programs and the resettlement, and i realized there is nothing left. So i had another meeting with christopher and ben reed the undersecretary and i said, look, guys, i will do it for a week. I and that one week lasted my entire career. And so it was to get up there quick enough to avoid disaster. And so i got word that from cy vance that we start doing two or three options for the resettlements and we did the budgets for it. And by the way, we had no money, and the committees had done zero on the appropriation, and the bank was dry and here we were going for the Big Initiative and many of you know about the ops center on the seventh floor of the state department. It is a big table and the Foreign Policy leards of the day were all there. And how many people are we going to take in . That is the issue. We had a u. S. Coordinator, but because the issue was dollars and people, he felt that i should take the lead. So after 30 to 40 minutes of discussion, the discussion between me and jolbert who wanted to go big, and i said, i know the constraints and congress is not giving us money for peasant operations and now you are talking about quad ruppling, but we had to come out with the decision, and i initially agreed with 10,000 per month, and that is going to break the bank and unrealistic, but i will go that far. So we left that meeting and did a normal thing, and a decision memo to the white house. Brzezinski shuffled it through the process over there and we got no word, no decision. So president carter announced that he was going to tokyo on this economic summit, and while it was there, he wanted to make an announcement on the refugees, and so we went back double duty and we had the options ready, and the preferred was 10,000. And now, on the flight on the way over holbrooke, and if you know dick holbrooke, you can believe this, holbrooke was banging away at carter the whole trip. I searched the record, but there is no indication that he made any decision, but the next day, president carter announced it is 14,000 a month. And i told him that nobody has ever done that before. I couldnt as a career bureaucrat, i couldnt do that. Anything above that has to be president ial. So i came to really respect jimmy carter to make the right call and ignore all of the noise, and what i was telling him, this is what it needs, and he made the right call. That is what a real president does. Now we came back from geneva, and i might mention this one thing on Vice President mondale. His speech was absolutely brilliant. And he left out one thing, and he said it is a test of civilization. And in the real speech he said and after the delegates left and a few weeks later tonight closed in. That struck people. And so who wants to try to do better . They came away with 290 million and it does not sound like much nowaday, but back then, it was a lot of money. So we came back to washington and my job then was to start carrying it out with 168,000, and soy called my team in to do the resettlement, and i was just thinking, all of my people are in geneva and what if something happens in new jersey . So i moved that meeting back and i called all of the ngos in the United States to a meeting in west virginia. We spent three difficult days there. The first half day was letting them tell how the government had not been treating them as equal problems. So your predecessor, mark, he was there. And then for next two days, two and a half days, we sat down there and we said what is the responsibility of an ngo to resettle a refugee in this country . We carved it out. Now, before we said the legal vehicle for all of this was contract. I said it is not a contract, it is a cooperative agreement, and we have to use that procedure, and solve you now may remember the cooperative agreement here and under the terms and it has been improved over the years, be the United States has successfully resettled over 3. 5 million refugees in the country. And from the geneva conference, and english as a second language program. I brought a lady who is the peace corps director from thailand back, and we sat down and carved it out. What it ended up being is the Worlds Largest english Language Training center that we added in the philippines center, and other improvements flowing from the act. I had the privilege to stay in the state department during president carters return, and we left and the other team had to leave, and i was asked to stay on. So i transferred over to the republic years when george shuldz ca schultz had come in, and he asked me to be the permanent director which i did for the last four years. When i left president reagan, and secretary schultz nominated me to be the u. S. Kacandidate t go to geneva and i spent ten years there. I have had the chance to see virtually every serious complex that the world has been involved n and i can see the u. S. Leadership, and the changes that have been made, and so each one added. We have strengthened and improved the program and it is really great. I keep coming back after all of this work and say what started it all . What was the seminel event that started it all, and it is president jimmy carter, and Vice President mondale, you were terrific. As you were talking, you talked about the importance of the leadership and you were talking about the importance of the elected officials, but it is also the leadership of the staff at the level, and the importance of leadership of president s and members of congress on making sure that they are putting good hard working dedicated people in the positions. Because as someone who is a former staffer, you know, this is where the work gets done at the deep level. And so that is really the benefit of the conversation, and so that is opening the curtain behind the scenes, and trying to figure out and find out how the refugee act of 1980 came to be. And soing at that, and it was a very difficult Political Climate and so if you took the refugee act of 1980 out of the picture, and looking at the management of the indochina crisis and the cold war and it s is remarkable that it was presented and signed and a remarkable achievement to be credited to president carter. So what else was the catalyst . Was it president carter . What else allowed the act to be pushed. I would like to hear from you on the legislative side . Jim mentioned similar events. One was the indochina refugee crisis, and the constant communication required between the executive and the legislative and at that time, they did respect the legislative vessels in these things. It was a tough time bidding there, and some of the assertive members on the committee at this time, but it was constant. And the process became a little bit unworkable, because in the consultation, there were regular consultations defined into the categories to allow the chinese to come in, and would happen in the recess that i am trying to find people all over the world and find an agreement to what these changes were, and this had not worked. This is a different time. And that is what the ektive and the legislative branch is doing, and they could Work Together very well. So any the indochina crisis is one of the events, and also taking over for the 1979 management, and also, ted kennedy taking over the chair of the Senate Judiciary committee and also you had rodinohs leadership. And he had served on the immigration subcommittee for 24 years before he was chairman of the subcommittee in 1971. And so, he continued to watch the subCommittee Chairman what the exception is. And when he came over, he said that he had a big conference, and the refugees and what she needed for help, but there was always a interest there. And so the steady hand, and gleason retiring and kennedy taking over, and so it was really a confluence of events that made the refugee act possible. Politically at the time that senator kennedy and president carter were politically opposed. And yet, they were able to Work Together on this. And so in the current local climate it is hard to imagine, two political opponents coming together to Work Together or was it seamless . I guess that is my question. No, it is very close to the staffers that i can tell you that president ial politics never entered into the equation of the passing the refugee act of 1980. It was not an issue. Little known fact that helped us in the process as well is that the little known fact is that r rodinho was also to be the running mate for carter, but then after the impeachment exercises, carter was very goodt that period of time. Do you any thoughts on the events . The events of that time, and i think that the events were propelling us as a society to do a better job on refugees. Not only was it indochina. December of 79 i looked at the cable traffic and lo and behold the soviet union had invaded afghanistan, and 3. 5 to 5 million mor