U.S. Urged to Conduct Repatriation of Refugees on Business Basis

The repatriation of refugees after the war must be considered a series of business projects in which the United States would invest when they seemed sound investments, Rep. Charles Dewey of Illinois suggested today to the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The United States, however, would provide no more than fifty percent of the funds needed for such repatriation.

Under Rep. Dewey’s proposal the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration would have to get special American permission to use American-appropriated money for repatriating refugees. Rep. Dewey, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President Coolidge and later American financial adviser to Poland, asked that the bill appropriating money for United States participation in UNRRA be amended. He differentiated between relief, which he defined as food, clothing and shelter, and rehabilitation, and he proposed a central reconstruction fund which would administer all money appropriated by the United States for the rehabilitation work of UNRRA.