“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free....”

These words are part of the inscription on the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. Ford referred to the “philosophy symbolized” in that statue in appealing May 1 for more money to cover the cost of bringing in refugees from Vietnam.

Ford’s view of the “poor” and of “huddled masses” hardly corresponded with the reality.

Torturers, policemen, and murderers trooped off the planes. Guards of the tiger cage prisons as well as the powerful generals and their bagmen were there. Also present were the corrupt officials and politicians who diverted huge sums from the billions of American dollars poured into Saigon.

“I had been expecting people with tattered, torn clothing and the marks of battle,” said a marine watching them arrive in California, “but you just don’t see that.”

One of the refugees was Hong Van Hoanh, “a dapper man of prominence, prestige and privilege,” reported a New York Times correspondent.

“With a thriving business, a young wife, a dozen children, two large houses, four cars and seven servants, he was the envy of his neighbors and a prince among his peers.”

Another of the arrivals in search of a “new life” was Lt. Gen. Nguyen Van Manh. He landed by helicopter on a navy evacuation ship “accompanied by two aides who were straining under the weight of their attaché cases,” said Newsweek correspondent Ron Moreau. “When the ship’s security officers took a look into the cases, they found them to be loaded with gold bars.”

“Refugees” such as these appear to be acclimatizing well. An airline employee told the Los Angeles Times that a young Vietnamese woman had bought six tickets for a weekend in Las Vegas – and paid for them in crisp $20 bills. He estimated she had about $10,000 in U.S. currency in her purse.

Former puppet Premier Nguyen Cao Ky was one of the most prominent rats. He quickly put on a publicity show to help out his friends in Washington, who have been getting a bad press over the defeat they suffered in Vietnam.

A group of reporters found their way to this “flamboyant little dictator” now at Camp Pendleton in California. He was warming his hands over a trash fire burning in a blackened corrugated barrel. He still wore his lavender scarf, but his twin pearl-handled revolvers were gone. Interviewed in 1965, Ky had said that he had only one hero. Hitler, and that what was needed to save Vietnam were four or five Hitlers. Interviewed on May 6, however, he was playing the part of a man of the people:

“I’m going through normal procedure,” he told reporters.

“See,” he said, pulling back the flap door of his tent, “I’m staying here just like anybody else.” Ky said he was looking for a sponsor who would help him set up as a farmer. He said he had given up an earlier plan to become a taxicab driver.

“It was good theater, according to some of the Vietnamese refugees who observed Mr. Ky’s first hours here,” reported Jon Nordheimer in the May 7 New York Times. “However, they were not entirely convinced when he said he was without significant funds or influence or that he looked forward to life in America as a cab driver or farmer.”

Ky’s act was marred a bit by the VIP treatment that his wife and her party of fifteen received when they arrived in Hawaii several days earlier. Included in the baggage she brought with her from Saigon were three automobiles. Ky’s “normal procedure” did not begin immediately either. When he arrived on the command ship Blue Ridge after the final helicopter evacuation from Saigon, he was installed, under guard, in a private stateroom.

Not everyone was taken in by Ky’s theater. A small task force of Swiss- American bullion dealers flew to Fort Smith, Arkansas. They said they had come to help relieve the Vietnamese of what are believed to be “considerable amounts” of gold bars, gold coins, and gold dust.

“We have been told by the State Department that many of the people coming here have brought out lots of gold and foreign exchange,” said one of the dealers. “We are (here) to buy it from them – and make some money for the company as well.”

A Gallup poll released May 1 found that only 36 percent of those interviewed favored allowing the Vietnamese to stay in the United States, while 54 percent said they should be kept out.

Many Americans recognize the “refugees” for what they are and want nothing to do with them. “These people that have got the dough and have been selling heroin for the last 10 years, I say no,” was the reaction of a Los Angeles woman. “I don’t want these people that shove women and children off planes.”

Also involved are racist attitudes fostered by the government itself: both the virulent anti-Asian racism encouraged by a war of annihilation against the “gooks” and “slopeheads”; and anti-”alien” racism based on making foreign-born workers the scapegoats for unemployment.

Just outside the huge Eglin Air Force Base in Florida where many of the refugees are to be housed, the small town of Niceville was up in arms about them. A petition asking that the refugees be placed elsewhere was circulated. Children in one local school joked about shooting a few of the refugees.

“There’s no telling what kind of diseases they’ll be bringing with them,” said the manager of the American Opinion Book store, a franchised operation of the John Birch Society.

At the nearby Fort Walton Beach High School, students talked about organizing a “gook klux klan.” One class said they were afraid the refugees would try to convert them to Communism.

“But they’re not Communists,” one student argued. “They’re coming here because they’re running from Communists.”

“It doesn’t matter,” was the response. “They’re Vietnamese aren’t they?”

Niceville tried to cover up its initial xenophobic reactions by organizing a welcome when the first Vietnamese arrived there May 4. The Niceville high-school band turned out and played “God Bless America.”

The predominant objection to the refugees, however, was that they would “take away American jobs” and swell welfare rolls.

Ford was reported as being “damned mad” at the widespread opposition to his refugee program. “It just burns me up,” he said. At his May 6 news conference he declared he was “primarily very upset because the United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants of all countries.”

But the tradition of American imperialism has always been different from what Ford the great humanitarian would have us believe. The door has been open only for those the ruling class decides it wants to allow in. For the rest, the door is kept firmly shut.

For about 675,000 counterrevolutionary Cubans the door was wide open.

But it is a different matter for the victims of repressive dictatorships around the world.

Haitians fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship who manage to reach the United States are subject to imprisonment and deportation; that is, almost certain torture or death in Haiti.

Refugees from the rightist terror in Chile found no open door. Tens of thousands were murdered and tortured after the CIA-backed coup in 1973, but Washington refused asylum to all but a few of the many Chileans and others who had to flee.

After President Marcos of the Philippines declared martial law in September 1972, many Filipinos resident in the United States applied to political asylum. But the State Department and the Immigration Service “have given them the run-around,” and they live in “mortal fear” of being deported, according to a letter printed in the May 3 Los Angeles Times. The writer demanded that Filipino refugees be given the same treatment as the South Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.

Refugees from dictators in Washington’s camp are not the only ones turned away, however. When Hitler came to power in Germany and millions of Jews faced death, the White House barred granting them refuge in the United States. Only a handful were admitted. In 1939 a bill that would have allowed 20,000 children from Germany under the age of fifteen to enter the country was rejected by Congress.

The same year almost 1,000 Jewish refugees on board the St. Louis sealed from Hamburg to the coast of Florida and were denied permission to land. The ship returned to Europe and many of its passengers ended up in Nazi concentration camps.

Hitler’s admirers are welcome, but not his victims.

Not all the refugees filling camps from Guam to Florida are like Nguyen Cao Ky and his ilk, however. Many will no doubt clamor to return to Vietnam once they - get a taste of what life in the land of the big PX is really like for people lacking white skins and ready cash.

Propaganda from Thieu and his masters in Washington about a Communist “bloodbath” after liberation was certainly a factor in bringing many to leave. One government clerk who was left behind in Saigon was puzzled as he watched the jubilation in the city when the liberation forces arrived. “We were told we would be killed,” he remarked to a British reporter. “It looks as if that was another lie.”

Others were press-ganged into leaving and already want to go back.

Forty-five South Vietnamese air force mechanics were drugged and kidnapped when their pilots fled to Thailand on April 29. They petitioned Ford to “send us back to South Vietnam as soon as possible no matter what the Communist government has reserved for us.”

Also at Guam was a twenty-eight-year-old teacher, who boarded a small boat near Vung Tau just to flee the rocket attacks, thinking the boat would return to shore that night. Instead he was picked up by an American ship.

According to United Press International, interviews with refugees at Clark Air Base in the Philippines indicated that many would have been safe in Saigon, and some said they already wished they had never left.

Some of the Vietnamese associated with the American intervention were well aware of what to expect in the United States and consciously stayed behind. “In the end the color of the skin counts for more than politics,” said one. “Anyone who has lived in either the United States or Vietnam knows this, and I have done both. The Vietcong, like me, are yellow.”

The intended station in life for many of the refugees was frankly indicated by a director of the organization arranging resettlement. Once the flow of wealthy businessmen and generals with bags of gold leveled off, a less favored class of refugees began arriving. It may be easier to find a job “for this kind of person,” he said. “Everyone seems to want a maid or a cook.”

A Vietnamese orphan who lived in America for ten years now wants to go home. “I thought nothing could possibly be wrong in America,” said Son Minh Nguyen, who came to California at the age of eleven. “Next to heaven, America is it, I thought.” But he found that he couldn’t get accepted. “They can’t accept me and I can’t accept them,” he said. “I would prefer to go back to the simple and enjoyable life I had in Vietnam. Whether it’s Communist or not, I don’t care.”

Do Ba Phuoc, a graduate student in mathematics who has also been in America for ten years, greeted the end of the war by announcing his intention to return home. His father, who had at one time been vice-minister of education in the Saigon government, arrived in California with his mother on a refugee flight just as he was preparing for a journey in the opposite direction.

Now that peace has come, and Vietnam has a new beginning, wrote Phuoc in the May 2 Los Angeles Times, “along with many other Vietnamese students in this country, for the first time I will have a chance to make a lasting contribution to my homeland. An American education will afford an opportunity to build – not destroy – Vietnam....

“The U.S. airlift has sown discord among the Vietnamese, and many have fled in panic. But I am sure that, as the facts about the nation’s new life filter out, many will seek to return home....

“For the people of Vietnam, this peace ends the long interruption in our 4,000-year-old tradition of independence from foreign domination. In truth, then, the common people of Vietnam owe a tribute to the common people of the United States, for it is you who have given us back our freedom. It is you who forced the government in Washington to end this unjust and immoral war.”

Source: https://www.themilitant.com/Intercontinental_Press/1975/IP1319.pdf#page=4&view=FitV,3