Boat People, Old and New

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The humanitarian disaster now unfolding in the Mediterranean, where 1,500 of what are now being called the new boat people have perished in only the past few days, takes us back — to Vietnam. The epic of the refugees, who in the 1970s fled the communist conquest of Indochina, was one of the stories that forged our political worldview. We will never forget it. All the great principles are going to be tested anew in the catastrophe being triggered by the advance of radical Islam the Middle East.

Indochina’s refugee crisis came to a head in the first half of 1978, when the deputy premier of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohammad, vowed to push back into the sea something like 74,000 Vietnamese who had managed to reach its beaches. The editor of the Sun, writing in Haaretz this morning, recalled Dr. Mahathir warning that if the refugees being pushed back to sea attempted to scuttle their own vessels, they wouldn’t be rescued. “They will drown,” he said.

The Indochina crisis began to turn in June 1978, when the Group of Seven industrial nations — in part at the urging of an editorial campaign in the Wall Street Journal — scrapped the agenda for the Tokyo summit and turned their attention to the boat people. The vast program that resulted eventually found refuge for more than 2 million persons, of whom America took more than a million and a quarter and France, Canada, and Australia another half million, according to tallies of scholar Courtland Robinson of Johns Hopkins.

That made those countries huge net winners in the denouement of the Vietnam war. One of the things the Indochina crisis taught was the logic of the pro-life movement, the logic of what the economists call human capital — the idea, always grasped by the sages of religious law, that more people are better. It taught us that communism was inherently inhospitable to human capital and that freedom was its most fertile soil. The Indochina refugees have proven to be a boon to all the countries that took them.

All this is going to be tested in the current crisis, which is taking place in the context of a broad advance by an Islamist ideology that is hostile to Christianity, Judaism, and secularist worldviews. It has been building for several years, and the Europeans are overwhelmed. The Italian government launched Operation Mare Nostrum in 2013, when something like 60,000 migrants reached Europe. That number swelled to 218,000 in 2014.

Late last year, Mare Nostrum gave way to a more modest, but European-wide, effort called Operation Triton. The terrible drownings in recent days have shocked the European ministers into a meetings this week, including today at Luxembourg. It would be wrong to belittle their efforts. But it is hard to imagine that Europe, which has been unable to assimilate the Muslims who have made it there in recent generations, is going to open up the way the West did to the Indochina refugees.

All the more urgent to return to the offensive in the war against Islamist nihilism in the Middle East, a campaign that awaits a restoration of American leadership. This is unlikely to come from President Obama, who has made the centerpiece of his foreign policy a retreat from the Middle East. But neither is a foreign policy for this crisis being fully enunciated on the Republican hustings. Senator Rubio and Governor Jeb Bush, who arose from Florida, where the story of the boat people in the Caribbean has been so dramatic, are logical candidates to take the lead. Who will step forward now?


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