IMMIGRATION: Help from the Heart

In rallies at Yale and U.C.L.A. and the University of North Carolina, U.S. students cheered Hungary’s freedom fighters. In New York City office girls paraded to raise contributions for Hungarian relief. Pittsburgh bakers tried to find out how to send a team to bake bread for refugees in Vienna. New York’s Chas. Pfizer & Co. donated $200.000 worth of antibiotics, flown free to Vienna by Pan American World Airways. The Penn-Texas Corp. (which owns Hallicrafters, Colt’s, Pennsylvania Coal and Coke, etc.) led a host of U.S. business firms by offering jobs, training and housing to 1,000 refugees. Across the U.S., more than 50 relief organizations went their separate ways collecting money, clothes and offers of help to Hungarians.

At the U.S. Army’s bleak entry point at Camp Kilmer, N.J., six federal agencies and seven private volunteer organizations tumbled over one another in processing the 1,004 Hungarians who had already arrived there. Neighboring householders wandered casually in to see if some Hungarian might like a home-cooked meal. It was all very distressing to the epicures of by-the-numbers bureaucracy. AMERICA BUNGLES AID TO HUNGARIANS, Cried the Scripps-Howard newspapers. “The heart is there, but the organization is lacking . . . It is a classic case of too many cooks.”

Magic Word. Organization was lacking, all right, but bungling was the wrong word for it. The U.S., 4,000 miles from Hungary, bound by strict immigration laws, confronted by a refugee tide whose swell no one could have foreseen, was straining hard to be of human help in the crisis. Its effort came from the heart—and in its spontaneity lay strength, not weakness.

When Hungary flared into revolution, help could not wait on bureaucratic processes. It had to come fast, and if it had not come makeshift, it might not have come at all. Within a week of the outbreak of street fighting in Budapest, the International Rescue Committee (founded in 1935 to help refugees from Nazi Germany) sent its president, Angier Biddie Duke, and chairman, Leo Cherne, to Europe with 15,000 units of terramycin. In Vienna Cherne and another I.R.C. associate loaded a battered Chevrolet with clothing, drugs—and 30 loaves of bread. Pushing through to Budapest, they were stopped more than 20 times, once by a pair of Russian tanks, more often by rebel fighters. What got them through to the rubble-strewn city where lighted candles cast an eerie glow in the darkness? A Red Cross flag and an unofficial password: America.

Momentous Victory. Now, I.R.C. is one of about six U.S. agencies in Austria setting up tents on the border where bone-weary refugees can eat and change wet clothes, transporting them to Vienna in hired buses and helping them through the tangles of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act at the U.S. consulate. There, with a helping hand from U.S. Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson and his embassy staff, augmented by Foreign Service men from Washington and nearby European posts, the consular crew worked around the clock to speed the refugees through.

Most Americans agreed that this was the least they could do for the men and women who came with little but walked with a determined air. “They came not because they were defeated,” said I.R.C. Board Member William Vanden Heuvel, as he flew home last week from Vienna. “They are not poor, fearful, tired people, but people who still believe in a free Hungary to come.” Then he added: “These are people who have won a victory, the most momentous victory since World War II. It is we who owe them a debt.”

Orderly Action. Help from the heart had paid only part of that debt. Now it was time for more orderly action. Last week President Eisenhower appointed Tracy S. Voorhees, 66, a veteran troubleshooter, former (1949-50) Under Secretary of the Army and onetime U.S. Food Administrator for Occupied Areas, as his personal representative to coordinate work in resettling the Hungarian refugees. Then (after proclaiming a new $5,000,000 Red Cross Hungarian relief drive) the President boosted the number of refugees to be admitted to the U.S. from 5,000 to 21,500.*

* Of the 21,500, only 6,500 can receive visas under the Refugee Relief Act; the rest will be admitted under a clause of the McCarran-Walter Act that authorizes the admission of “parolees” with no permanent status. Ike is gambling that Congress, when it convenes, will pass special legislation to grant permanent entry to the parolees.