VZCZCXRO0861
RR RUEHCHI RUEHDT RUEHNH
DE RUEHHM #0061/01 0140331
ZNR UUUUU ZZH
R 140331Z JAN 08
FM AMCONSUL HO CHI MINH CITY
TO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC 3573
INFO RUCNASE/ASEAN MEMBER COLLECTIVE
RUEHHM/AMCONSUL HO CHI MINH CITY 3793

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 05 HO CHI MINH CITY 000061 
 
SIPDIS 
 
SENSITIVE 
SIPDIS 
 
STATE FOR PRM, PRM/A, EAP/MLS, AND CA/VO 
 
E.O. 12958: N/A 
TAGS: PREF PHUM CVIS PREL VM
SUBJECT: HUMANITARIAN RESETTLEMENT PROCESS DISTILLED 
 
REF: A. A:  07 HCMC 1281 
 
     ¶B. B:  HCMC 10 
     ¶C. C: HCMC 39 
     ¶D. D:  07 HANOI 2098 
     ¶E. D:  HCMC 20 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000061  001.2 OF 005 
 
 
¶1. (U) Summary:  Roughly eighteen months into the two year 
Humanitarian Resettlement (HR) process application period, the 
pool of potential viable applicants appears to be almost 
exhausted, as shown by an overall approval rate (ratio of total 
applications to approved cases) of only two percent.  There may 
be a few hundred who have not applied yet.  Thus far, slightly 
more than 1,100 people have received approval to resettle in the 
U.S.  Many more -- about 150,000 counting eligible family 
members -- have submitted applications for resettlement, but are 
not qualified.  Economically, Vietnam today is a far different 
place than it was just a few years ago; those possibly 
meritorious cases who might not have had the financial 
wherewithal to even apply for resettlement a decade ago do not 
face the same obstacles today.  As noted reftel C, the changing 
economy also means that a number of people whose personal 
history of persecution may have qualified them for the program 
are doing quite well(sometimes spectacularly well) in the "new 
Vietnam" and have no desire to emigrate. 
 
¶2. (U) (Summary, Continued) The GVN generally has been 
cooperative with the HR process in tone and in substance, within 
the limitations of its environment.  Moreover, this cooperation 
has improved over time, aided by a bilateral Joint Working Group 
(JWG) mechanism that has built trust and good will.  How the HR 
endgame plays out will depend as much on the USG as on the GVN. 
Key variables include whether and when the McCain Amendment is 
renewed, the rate at which USCIS provides adjudicators, and the 
extent to which the GVN will be amenable to providing visas for 
our expat caseworkers after the HR application period ends. 
Given these variables -- and the McCain Amendment in particular 
-- it is entirely possible that the HR section will continue to 
face a significant workload after the PRM staffing for the 
section ends in 2009.  End summary. 
 
----------------------------------- 
The Applicants:  Blood from a Stone 
----------------------------------- 
¶3. (U) HR is the re-opening of three Vietnamese refugee 
categories that were part of the erstwhile Orderly Departure 
Program (ODP), an international effort to end the chaotic 
departure by sea and land from Vietnam in the 1980's. At the 
time ODP ended in the mid-1990's, there was some feeling in the 
United States that a substantial number of eligible Vietnamese 
had not been able to apply or complete applications for reasons 
beyond their control.  Some were too poor to obtain necessary 
documents or to travel to Ho Chi Minh City from remote parts of 
Vietnam.  Others in remote areas had not learned about the 
program or were not able to communicate with ODP.  More 
troubling were isolated accounts that Vietnamese authorities 
interfered with or prevented some from communicating with ODP. 
However, before closing cases, ODP made exhaustive attempts to 
communicate by letter, telex, and telephone with applicants. 
This succeeded in so many cases that there was no systematic 
reason to believe that those who did not respond were suffering 
GVN interference.  Rather, it appeared that these persons were 
not interested in resettlement. 
 
¶4.  (U) Vietnam has experienced rapid economic growth throughout 
the intervening years although large parts of rural Vietnam are 
still very poor.  Relations between the U.S. and Vietnam have 
improved substantially in the meantime and the internal 
political climate is significantly less restrictive than when 
ODP was operating.  Therefore, most of the factors that might 
have prevented people from applying before are much less 
significant now. 
 
¶5.  (U) HR re-visited and re-opened three ODP categories: those 
for former re-education camp inmates (HO), former USG employees 
(U-11), and former employees of U.S. entities (V-11).  Qualified 
re-education camp inmates had to have been punished because of 
their association with the USG or USG policies with at least 
three years of re-education, or to have had at least one year of 
re-education along with one or more of the following:  training 
or education on U.S. soil, a year or more of verified employment 
with the USG, a year or more of verified employment with a U.S. 
entity.  Qualified U-11 and V-11 applicants had to have worked 
for at least five years in their respective categories and to 
have suffered persecution because of their association with the 
U.S.  Over a quarter (almost 16,000) of HR applicants to date do 
not even partially fit any of these criteria.  Almost two-thirds 
of applicants (about 38,000) have made claims related to the 
three categories, but have still not met basic requirements. 
Most were not in re-education long enough.  Others have little 
or no evidence of claimed U.S. training or employment.  Another 
group has demonstrated credible evidence of combined USG and 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000061  002.2 OF 005 
 
 
U.S. entity employment that added together exceeds five years, 
but there is no refugee category for such persons. 
 
¶6. (U) Demonstrating eligibility for HO is relatively 
straightforward.  The GVN issued Re-education Camp Release 
Certificates (Gia Ra Trai or GRT) to inmates upon their release 
from camp.  The standard certificate identifies the former 
inmate, shows the dates of entry into and release from 
re-education, and the reason for re-education.  Some 
certificates were issued without entry dates.  The GVN can 
verify many of these certificates and in some cases can supply 
missing dates.  However, records for some camps have been lost 
through the intervening years.  Some false certifications have 
also been issued, according to our GVN contacts.  Over the years 
there have also been many accounts of solicitations for bribery 
to issue false or inflated GRTs on the one hand, or of payments 
to issue a correct document on the other.  ODP caseworkers and 
adjudicators commonly requested GVN verification of GRTs and we 
have resumed that practice under HR. 
 
¶7. (U) Those trying to qualify for HO "1+1" based on a year in 
re-education and U.S. training or a year of employment with the 
USG or a U.S. entity face a more challenging task.  As with many 
other Vietnamese refugee categories, the interpretation of 
requirements for HO 1+1 shifted during the 1980's and 1990's. 
By 1995, the erstwhile Immigration and Naturalization Service 
ruled definitively that qualifying training had to have taken 
place on U.S. soil.  U.S. sponsored training elsewhere, 
including on a U.S. warship, does not count.  Nonetheless, many 
individuals try to apply without qualifying training.  After 
being rejected for insufficient time (less than three years) in 
re-education, many write appeal letters asking why their claimed 
training was not taken into account for 1+1.  The answer is 
almost invariably that their training did not meet the criteria 
or was insufficiently documented.  These persons make up the 
single largest set of rejected applicants. 
 
¶8. (U) Demonstrating U-11 and V-11 employment is much more 
difficult than demonstrating re-education.  People have tended 
to keep their GRTs.  However in 1975, many Vietnamese, afraid of 
being linked with the Americans, destroyed their employment 
records.  Time has taken its toll on the remaining records and 
on memories.  HRS checks all U-11 applicants with the National 
Personnel Records Center (NPRC), which has confirmed the 
employment of several hundred U-11s.  Many V-11 employers no 
longer exist and few of those that remain keep 30-45 year old 
personnel records.  Sometimes former Amcit bosses or co-workers 
remember an individual employee, but it is rarer that they still 
recall the duration of their old colleague's employment.  A very 
small number of applicants have qualified almost solely on the 
basis of convincing secondary evidence such as photographs 
combined with detailed accounts of their work experience. 
 
¶9. (U) The HO category inherently includes a persecution claim 
-- a long period in re-education.  The publicized criteria for 
the U-11 and V-11 categories do not.  Applicants in these 
categories must provide a credible persecution story.  Many of 
those who can demonstrate employment were not persecuted.  To 
their surprise, the lack of persecution disqualifies them. 
Since the GVN has never allowed the persecution requirement for 
the U-11 and V-11 categories to be publicized in Vietnam, many 
otherwise qualified applicants are unaware of it.  Many of these 
individuals did not suffer any more than their neighbors did in 
the years after 1975.  For most, their qualifying employment 
ended during the "Vietnamization" phase of the war in the early 
1970's.  They had two or three years to bury their past before 
the Communist takeover.  If the new authorities ever discovered 
their past, it was often not until so long after the fact that 
the authorities no longer cared. 
 
¶10. (SBU) The day after the first announcement of HR to the 
public in December 2005, several hundred people came to the 
Consulate General seeking information about the process.  Since 
then, HRS and the GVN have distributed at least 108,000 HR 
application forms.  HRS has reviewed over 58,000 applications 
with about six percent found qualified for presentation to 
USCIS.  The number and quality of new applications has declined 
over time.  The results from USCIS adjudications show an even 
steeper decline in quality.  USCIS approved about 70 percent of 
applicants during the first circuit ride in 2006.  The approval 
rate during the most recent circuit ride was below sixteen 
percent.  It is important to note that the CIS circuit riders 
only review those cases found to be most credible.  The overall 
approval rate for all applications received is roughly two 
percent.  While we anticipated that the number of persons who 
could rightfully claim to be "refugees" derived from their 
wartime and immediate post-war circumstances would be small when 
we launched HR two years ago, we did not expect it to be this 
miniscule. 
 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000061  003.2 OF 005 
 
 
--------------------- 
AN UNCERTAIN END GAME 
--------------------- 
¶11. (U) PRM intends to cease staffing the slot for the HR 
section chief when the incumbent departs in 2009.  While this 
decision is understandable when viewed in terms of the number of 
successful applicants who actually immigrate to the USA as a 
result of HR section operations, the section's workload is 
largely determined by the total number of applicants rather than 
the number of applications approved.  There are two variables 
that could have a large impact on concluding HR processing.  On 
the U.S. side, the most important variable is reauthorization of 
the McCain Amendment.  The McCain Amendment allows for the 
resettlement of unmarried adult children of approved HO 
applicants along with or following their parents.  McCain 
applications (1,149 currently pending) represent over one third 
of the HR cases awaiting USCIS interview (2,734).  The Amendment 
lapsed at the end of FY-07 although language to extend it for 
two years is in the FY-08 Foreign Operations Bill.  While USCIS 
has determined that it can adjudicate McCain applications 
submitted before October 1, it cannot touch those received from 
that date, unless and until the measure is reauthorized.  Unless 
the reauthorization contains language tying it to the end of the 
HR application period, it will probably be necessary to continue 
accepting McCain applications even after the end of the HR 
application period.  Earlier this year HRS was still receiving a 
few McCain applications tied to ODP beneficiaries that resettled 
in the U.S. over a decade ago.  A late reauthorization of the 
McCain Amendment will delay the completion of Humanitarian 
Resettlement processing.  The GVN is eager to see the completion 
of the process and there is no U.S. benefit to stringing it out. 
 
 
¶12.  (U) Another variable that may impact processing completion 
is GRT verification.  While NPRC verifications are done 
electronically and require about six working days on average, 
the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) has needed much longer to 
check GRTs.  Centrally archived GRTs are usually verified in no 
more than six weeks.  However, well over half of the GRTs for 
which we have requested verification are not centrally archived. 
 If records of these documents exist at all, they are kept at 
the provincial level by local authorities who move at their own, 
often much slower, paces.  Some of these verifications have been 
outstanding for months and there is no telling how much longer 
they will be.  The GVN has also reported that it is often 
necessary to check with multiple provinces because they cannot 
tell where records of some camps ended up after numerous changes 
in administrative boundaries and place names. 
 
------------------------------------------- 
The Process:  Like a Python Digesting a Pig 
------------------------------------------- 
¶13. (U) Gearing up for HR, the then-Refugee Resettlement Section 
in Ho Chi Minh City roughly tripled its staff.  Then, in 
response to requests for tens of thousands of applications, 
staff more than doubled again, peaking at 45.  We kept current 
with requests for applications, but began to fall behind with 
evaluating completed responses.  The latter is a multi-step 
process that must be completed by relatively difficult to 
recruit and hire expatriate staff.  The backlog to evaluate 
completed applications reached more than thirteen weeks in 
October 2006.  Increases in efficiency (especially a new 
front-end database tool that allows simultaneous searching of 
six ODP archives), staff size, and a slowdown in new 
applications allowed us to eliminate the backlog by May 2007. 
 
¶14. (SBU) HRS informs unsuccessful applicants by letter.  We 
have found over 54,000 applicants unqualified and must clearly 
explain why to them.  This takes considerable effort; to date we 
have sent letters to almost 44,000 of them.  Refusals generate 
appeals that come in the mail along with hundreds or thousands 
of pieces of other mail each week.  Although the number of 
appeals is relatively small, a few thousand, sorting them out 
generates considerable work.  Although we are not required to do 
so, reviewing appeals has allowed us to fine-tune our refusal 
language and discover a small number of persons who may have 
articulated a clearer claim for resettlement the second time 
around, including a handful of Priority One cases.  The 
discovery of some possible Priority One cases in HR applications 
led us to place greater emphasis on initial screening for 
current persecution claims.  A number of such cases are 
currently in process. 
 
¶15. (U) HRS contacts those who are qualified for presentation to 
USCIS through the mail and sets up a date for prescreening with 
an HRS caseworker.  Prescreening is primarily to collect 
information to create a case and ready it for presentation to a 
USCIS adjudicator.  The three available interview rooms created 
a bottleneck in the whole process that we resolved in July 2007 
by building two additional rooms.  Under current conditions, 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000061  004.2 OF 005 
 
 
including planned USCIS circuit rides, we should be able to 
finish prescreening HR applicants before the end of FY 2008. 
During prescreening, the applicants' accounts are compared with 
evidence gathered from other sources such as the NPRC.  This 
sometimes leads to the closure of cases before they are 
presented to USCIS.  For instance, there have been a few dozen 
U-11 applicants with what initially seemed to be NPRC-verified 
employment.  During pre-screening these applicants described 
employment histories that were completely different from what 
NPRC found.  Almost all of these cases have involved persons 
with similar names and dates of birth.  Sometimes they have 
other evidence of USG employment, but most, if they were 
employed at all, were paid with "Non-Appropriated Funds" and are 
not eligible for resettlement.  These persons were not direct 
hires and included recreation association employees and private 
domestic servants. 
 
¶16. (U) After prescreening, applicants are scheduled for 
interview with USCIS.  Our latest estimate is that USCIS 
interviews may be finished by around the end of CY 2008.  The 
USCIS Refugee Corp provides adjudicators for HR and is planning 
four circuit rides during CY 2008 and another in early 2009 if 
necessary.  This is several months earlier than we had 
previously planned for thanks to a welcome stepped-up USCIS 
effort to complete this caseload.  Cases deferred by USCIS will 
take longer and the time required to complete any residual case 
load cannot be estimated.  There are still a handful of open ODP 
cases that are now over ten years old. 
 
--------------------------------------------- -------- 
The Bi-Lateral Relationship:  Different, But (Mostly) 
Constructive Approaches 
--------------------------------------------- -------- 
¶17. (U) The bilateral mechanism for working out differences over 
HRS processing is the JWG, which has met five times thus far. 
The fifth meeting, on December 13, is reported reftel D.  The 
beginning of the HR process was marked by a number of mismatched 
expectations between the USG and the GVN, but discussion within 
the JWG has smoothed out most of these misunderstandings.  The 
USG is represented at the JWG by USCG HCMC officers (led by the 
DPO); the GVN is represented by the MPS Department of 
Immigration and Emigration, MFA Consular Department, MFA North 
America Division, and MFA's HCMC ERO.  The JWG has resolved 
differences about the timetable of HR and about PIO efforts. 
The GVN wanted the entire HRS process to be completed within two 
years, but we have settled on a two-year application period and 
a best effort by the USG to finish the process as quickly as 
possible after that.  The GVN announced early on that it wanted 
to handle the PIO effort itself, but did not make clear that it 
expected to be reimbursed for expenses.  In January 2006, a 
month into the six-month publicity phase, outreach efforts 
stopped and the GVN asked for $70,000 to cover its expenses to 
that point.  This was a non-starter, but the two sides 
eventually agreed to two additional shorter USG-funded PIO 
rounds.  The first, in June 2007, targeted provinces with low HR 
application rates.  The second, in January or February 2008, 
will be a "last call." 
 
¶18. (U) The GVN's paradigm for refugee resettlement processes 
involves exchanges of lists.  True to form, the GVN requested 
several lists of HR applicants, including one showing "all 
applicants."  While the GVN later narrowed the scope of "all 
applicants" to "all screened-in applicants," this is still 
contrary to refugee confidentiality regulations.  We have not 
provided lists until after USCIS adjudication.  The GVN response 
has been to offer tantalizing bits of fraud information about 
unspecified applicants including some in approved cases.  When 
asked to share enough so that we could take action, they have 
replied that since they do not have the list of all applicants, 
they do not know if the detected fraud is related to HR until it 
is too late, adding that they do not consider it any of their 
business to contradict our decisions on particular cases. 
 
¶19. (SBU) JWG operations have become smoother as the two sides 
have become more used to working with each other.  Deputy 
Director of Immigration and Emigration, Colonel Le Xuan Vien, 
became the GVN's JWG chairman before the third meeting in 
November 2006.  He has been quick to identify points on which we 
must agree to disagree (such as the exchange of lists) and move 
on to more productive matters.  Communications have become 
quicker and somewhat less stilted as well, sometimes occurring 
without the almost ubiquitous GVN insistence on diplomatic 
notes.  It appears that most remaining JWG business can be 
conducted without face to face meetings of the entire group. 
The GVN has signaled that it only wants to meet one more time, 
at the end of June 2008, shortly after the end of the 
application period. 
 
¶20. (SBU) Paradoxically, GVN officials have also raised the idea 
of expanding the role of the JWG to refugee matters outside of 
 
HO CHI MIN 00000061  005.2 OF 005 
 
 
HR.  This makes a certain amount of sense since the players 
involved are the same across these issues.  The danger lies in 
the GVN possibly equating the character of HR (a humanitarian 
measure to deal with a problem that is essentially in the past) 
with the current problems addressed through the Priority One and 
Visas-93 processes.  Some individuals in the GVN (in and out of 
the JWG) have expressed interest in discretionary resettlement 
based on the desire of the applicant.  They see this as a way 
for people who are not happy in Vietnam to leave legally, 
regardless of whether they have a claim under any of the normal 
refugee categories.  This attitude may explain the surprising 
ease with which a portion of our Visas-93 and Priority One 
applicants receive necessary civil documents and passports.  It 
is possible that some in the GVN see these programs as safety 
valves.  On the other hand, GVN personnel, even members of the 
JWG, often make little or no distinction between the respective 
purposes of U.S. petition-based immigration and the U.S. Refugee 
Admissions Program.  This is one more example of the odd nature 
of "refugee" processing in Vietnam. 
FAIRFAX