Democratic presidential front-runner Joseph R. Biden, who has denounced President Trump’s efforts against Central American asylum-seekers, vigorously opposed resettling as refugees South Vietnamese who had helped the U.S. during the war.
The Washington Examiner reported Thursday, citing records from the administration of President Gerald R. Ford, that as a U.S. senator, Mr. Biden tried to deny refuge to hundreds of thousands fleeing the imminent North Vietnamese victory and likely Communist persecution.
Mr. Biden’s arguments about refugees reverse what he and other Democrats now insist are the only moral stances, saying that the U.S. had “no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals,” the Examiner reported.
“The United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese,” Mr. Biden said then.
In an April 1975 meeting at the White House with Ford and several of his top foreign-policy officials including Henry Kissinger, Mr. Biden said he would not vote to fund evacuation of non-Americans.
“We should focus on getting [U.S. troops] out. Getting the Vietnamese out and military aid for the [South Vietnam’s government] are totally different,” he said.
Mr. Kissinger told Mr. Biden and others in the Senate delegation that there were anywhere from 170,000 to a million South Vietnamese “to whom we have an obligation,” but the Delaware senator, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, denied that.
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