The Foreign Service Journal, June 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2019 27 with important Chinese arms and funds. For its part, the United States provided “nonlethal” assistance to a nascent noncommu- nist resistance to the Vietnamese client in Phnom Penh. It took the unraveling of the Soviet Union to convince the Vietnamese to negotiate a deal that saw the U.N. conduct, rather than merely monitor, the first-ever election in Cambodia in 1993. A different story unfolded in the Caribbean half a world away. The United States adopted two different policies toward refugees or migrants from Cuba and Haiti, respectively. U.S. domestic politics ensured that we accepted anyone who could escape the Cuban regime. In contrast, people from neighboring Hispaniola were not welcomed at all. A crisis in the early 1980s saw some 100,000 Cubans and 15,000 Haitians flee to the United States. Cubans were quickly paroled to the care of relatives. Haitians wound up targets of a Carter and then Reagan admin- istration policy of detention that, in response to court decisions, expanded to include all illegal immigrants. This policy persists to this day. During the period I served as ambassador to Haiti at the end of the 20th century, the United States adopted an aggressive policy to repel Haitian migrants. The United States regularly reconnoitered the west coast of Haiti to determine if new ships were under construction. When a vessel set forth toward Florida, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter would interdict it. Inspection of the vessel would find it unseaworthy. The passengers would be put aboard the cutter for transport back to a Haitian port while the Coast Guard sank the vessel. Today’s Political Environment More recently, the European Union has adopted a different, but equally unwelcoming, approach to limit migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea from Africa. Since 2014 a major surge in migration to first asylum countries in Europe has come from the Middle East (with many Syrians fleeing conflict to Turkey) In the 12 years following the 1975 fall of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, more than three million people fled Indochina by land or by boat, 1.3 million to the United States and almost as many elsewhere. First Lady Rosalynn Carter visits a hospital ward at Thailand’s Sa Kaeo refugee camp in November 1979 with UNHCR’s Mark Malloch Brown, at left, and American nurse Ann Rosenblatt, center. and, more recently, from Africa, the latter as much a function of population growth as war and rebellion. Since 2016 the European Union has invested considerable sums in Sudan, although not directly to the government in Khar- toum, to stabilize refugee flows and effectively limit movement through Sudan to Libya and on to the Mediterranean. Ethiopians, Eritreans and others displaced within Sudan itself allege abuse by Sudanese police and security agents, as well as by smugglers. The political environment, as David Frum accurately notes in the April 2019 Atlantic , has become increasingly unwelcoming to both immigrants and refugees. Countries see their resources taxed to the breaking point. As citizens in Europe and America face the prospect of an unlimited influx of foreigners in need of assistance, resentments grow and the most grudging elements of human nature come to the fore. The fact that European and Japanese populations are aging does not seem to make many disposed to recognize the value of younger labor. In the United States, I have pointed out to older relatives that America has reinvented itself regularly with immi- grants from Northern and Southern Europe, from Ireland, from Indochina and, most recently, South and Central America. While elements of preserving white privilege and place clearly TIMOTHYCARNEY