Second Thoughts About Limiting Soviet Jewish Immigration to the US

By John Asfour

About 185,000 Soviets immigrants entered Israel in 1990, according to Jewish Agency figures. This was 15,000 below estimates made three months before the end of the year, but after the Gulf crisis had begun. And all of 1990 was before the Scuds.

Although Soviet immigration may rise again as fear of the war subsides, it would be entirely erroneous to suggest that the present Middle East is where the Soviet Jews really want to go. In fact, George Bush has the power to change the direction of flow by providing "choice" to Soviet Jews if he wishes to do so to further his own peace process.

Of 20,000 Soviet citizens per month continuing to register to emigrate to the US, regardless of the longer wait, 50 percent are Jewish. Figures on applications to go to third countries such as Canada, or to Europe, are unavailable, but also are believed to be high.

American Jewish agencies long involved in caring for Soviet refugees in this country are now changing directions. For a time they went along with Israeli desires to cap Soviet Jewish immigration into the US at 40,000 per year in order to stimulate the flow to Israel. Now the Jewish agencies worry that if the refugees must wait for years to come to the US, they will stay home rather than acquiesce in being diverted to Israel.

A Speeded-Up Program

As many as 300,000 Soviet citizens are now registered with the US refugee status program. They will have to wait an estimated four to six years before coming, unless a special program to speed the flow is created and funded. Major American Jewish organizations have surfaced for congressional approval of just such a specific proposal. Cost of the speeded-up immigration to the United States would be at least $600 million in the next fiscal year. And, unless Congress removes the overall cap on refugee visas, the added numbers would be deducted from Asian or other refugee quotas.

Such a proposal will be opposed by the Israeli government. Israelis see it simply as a move that would divert most Soviet Jewish emigrants to the United States, where more than 90 percent of them would prefer to go, given a choice.

Meanwhile, Israeli sources report that some 2,500 of the new immigrants from the Soviet Union already have left or are preparing to leave for other countries. Since they are not able to come to the US, they have become patrons of an Israeli "black market" in visas for Australia, Latin America, Europe, or Canada. Although it is a loss of only one percent of the new immigrants, the re-emigration from Israel nevertheless worries Israeli politicians. What if America opened its doors to re-emigrants? That a large number would flee the present situation in Israel is revealed by surveys and informal newspaper investigations.

George Bush has the power to provide "choice” to Soviet Jews.

In Germany, immigration of more Soviet Jews has just been blocked by Bonn. Bonn claims that it imposed the ban at the insistence of the Israeli government. Israeli diplomats in Bonn deny it. Obviously, Germany is extremely sensitive to the potential charge of denying entrance to Jewish refugees.

Not so bureaucrats in Washington. US government officials continue to claim that restricting the flow of Soviet refugees in America in order to force the Jews among them to go to Israel, even against their will, will contribute to building confidence inside Israel that it will not lose the demographic war to Palestinians. Peace, these American officials continue to claim, is thus served by forcing up to two million reluctant Soviet Jews to settle in Israel.

In fact, Israeli peace activists, who cannot oppose Soviet immigration to Israel, declare privately that the effect on the peace process is negative, since many Soviet Jews are being settled, despite American objections, on newly seized Arab land. All this contributes to real and growing Arab fears that this is only a step to transferring Palestinians wholesale out of their native land, and replacing them with the massive Soviet immigration caused primarily by the American diversion of Soviet Jews. An Israel of six million Jews before 1995, led by a right-wing Orthodox establishment, is less likely to compromise on land-for-peace than to renew earlier Zionist claims to lands presently part of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

An expanded East Jerusalem is where some 10 percent of the new Soviet Jewish immigrants have been settled, also in direct contravention of American policy.

No one is heard suggesting to Washington that perhaps a quiet threat to open up American gates to Soviet Jewish and other refugees would end the actions of Sharon, obviously in compliance with the right wing of Shamir's cabinet, to confront Secretary Baker and his two-track peace efforts with new settlements on the West Bank.

Deliberate Official Blindness

The deliberate American official blindness to the connection between the Shamir/Sharon policy of letting Jews settle "anywhere in the land of Israel" and the American policy of denying Soviet refugees the right to emigrate to the United States after exiting the Soviet Union, as they used to be able to do, is related to the desire of both political parties in Washington to keep the lid on this problem of Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union until after the US elections in 1992. It will be too late then, however, to do anything about giving the refugees a choice, and in doing so giving Middle East peace a chance. This two-track policy of denying Soviet Jewish emigrants a choice of destination, and thereby making them instruments of efforts by Israel's right-wing nationalists to seize all of the Arab lands of the West Bank and Gaza for the New Israeli Order in the Middle East, is totally contrary to everything the US professes to support, at home and abroad. It also is a sure-fire formula for strangling the current Bush-Baker peace process in the cradle.

John Asfour is a Washington, DC-based specialist on the economy and demography of the Middle East.