Continuing improvements in the Soviet legal system could mean that fewer Soviet Jews will qualify to be admitted to the United States as refugees, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh said Tuesday.
“To the nature and the extent and the degree that (the Soviets) begin to build in their own rule of law — and I am a consummate skeptic on that — it makes it more difficult legally for us to admit more Jewish emigres,” Thornburgh told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
He made the remark after speaking here to the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s National Leadership Conference.
In order to qualify as refugees, Jews and other potential immigrants to the United States must demonstrate that they face a “well-founded fear of persecution” in their country of origin.
Thornburgh appeared to indicate that as the Soviet Union institutes legal protection for Jews and other minorities from discrimination and harassment, they will have less of a case to stand on when applying for U.S. refugee status.
This fiscal year, the United States is admitting 50,000 Soviets, mainly Jews, as refugees. But more than 100,000 Soviet Jews are estimated to be seeking entry to the United States as refugees.
All claim they suffer persecution for being Jewish.
U.S. Jewish groups have refrained from lobbying for an increase in the U.S. refugee ceiling for the Soviet Union, fearing that any additional numbers would come at the expense of other nationalities worldwide.
PAMYAT INVESTIGATION UNDER WAY
At the same time, American Jewish groups have expressed profound concern at the rising number of threats of anti-Semitic violence being reported from the Soviet Union. Groups such as the ultranationalist Pamyat have repeatedly threatened pogroms against the Jewish population.
Thornburgh pointed out that the Moscow prosecutor’s office last month began a criminal investigation of Pamyat and other anti-Semitic groups.
Thornburgh, in his prepared remarks to the Wiesenthal Center gathering, attributed the growth in racism and bigotry to “old Europe’s raucous ghettos.”
He also spoke of growing prejudice in the United States. He urged the 75 members of the audience to contact the Justice Department’s community relations service as a “low-key way to defuse some of these tensions.”
He said that at the Justice Department, combatting bigotry is a “high priority.”
Thornburgh said the administration strongly supports a bill adopted by the Senate last month that would require his department to compile statistics on domestic “hate crimes,” including those committed by such anti-Semitic groups as the Skinheads and the White Aryan Resistance.
He said U.S. hate groups generally appear to be “home grown” and not connected to similar groups abroad.
Vice President Dan Quayle also spoke out against bigotry in an address Monday at the Wiesenthal Center gathering’s opening reception.
“Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it,” he told the group.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
