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'The US has no obligation': Biden fought to keep Vietnamese refugees out of the US washex.am/2Jm3U2V
As a senator, the future vice president, now 76, was adamant that the U.S. had "no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals," dismissing concerns for their safety as the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong swept south toward Saigon in 1975.
His position was in stark contrast to the one he took nearly 30 years later over Iraqi and Afghan interpreters who had worked with U.S. forces. "We owe these people," "We have a debt to these people. They put their lives on the line for the United States."
As South Vietnam collapsed in the spring of 1975, President Ford and the US government undertook to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese families who had assisted the U.S. throughout the war. The leading voice in the Senate opposing this rescue effort was then-Sen. Joe Biden.
Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese allies were in danger of recriminations from the Communists, but Biden insisted that “the United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese.”
Kissinger said there were “Vietnamese to whom we have an obligation,” but Biden responded: “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended the bill be passed by the full Senate by a vote of 14 to 3. Biden was one of just three senators on the committee who voted nay. The report also passed the Senate as a whole by a vote of 46-17, where Biden again voted against it.
Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who did not manage to escape the country were eventually sent to reeducation camps, where they were often abused, tortured, or killed.
Despite opposition from Biden, and from other leading Democrats at the time, the U.S. military evacuated over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in the immediate wake of the collapse of South Vietnam, and hundreds of thousands more were resettled inside the U.S. in the following years.
Asked whether he thought it was fair to judge Biden based on his actions from 1975, Pham replied, “As someone running for President, it’s part of his record, just like everything else."
