Ruling Could Allow More Chinese to Enter U.S.

WASHINGTON —  In the first court decision of its kind, a U.S. immigration judge has ruled that a Chinese national is entitled to political asylum in this country because he would be persecuted by China’s strict population control policies if he were forced to return home.

If the ruling is upheld on appeal, it could open the way for other Chinese, even those who come to the United States illegally, to stay in this country as political refugees and to bring their spouses and children.

Decision Assailed

A Chinese government spokesman immediately denounced the decision.

The case involves Yun Pan Lee, 26, who had been in custody since he tried to enter the United States at San Francisco airport last October with a forged Singapore passport.

Lee comes from the city of Fuzhou in southern China and has a wife and two sons there. After the second child was born, local officials fined Lee, denied him work and cut off the electricity to his home. He said that when his wife, who is Catholic, became pregnant for the third time, she was forced by Chinese officials to have an abortion during the fifth month of pregnancy.

Since the beginning of this decade, China has sought to impose a general limit of one child per family for urban residents, although the regime has permitted a second child under some circumstances. The aim of the policy is to hold down the growth rate of China’s population, which is already nearing 1.1 billion, the largest of any nation in the world.

Thursday, after several weeks of hearings, U.S. Immigration Judge Bernard J. Hornbach of San Francisco granted political asylum to Lee, concluding that because of Lee’s opposition to China’s family planning policies, he might be subjected to religious or political persecution if he were returned to China.

In a brief telephone interview Friday as he was in the process of being released from detention, Lee, who speaks only Chinese, said that he is very happy. He said that he is unsure where he will work or live in the United States. When asked whether his wife will join him in the United States, he replied: “She’ll tell me.”

Philip Waters, deputy district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in San Francisco, declined to discuss the details of Lee’s case. The INS has 10 days to decide whether to appeal the judge’s ruling, Waters said, and “the case may not be over.”

Waters said there is no dispute that the effect of the judge’s ruling was to grant Lee asylum because of China’s population control policies. “That was the main theme of the whole thing,” he said.

The Chinese government did not take part in Lee’s immigration proceeding. But Wu Zurong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said Friday: “We hope that the court will correct its ruling.”

China ‘Flexible’

“We hold that every Chinese citizen should cooperate with the Chinese government in implementing the family planning policy,” the spokesman said. “The family planning policy is a state policy which benefits the whole country, the people and the world at large. The government, I think, is flexible and reasonable. If there are difficulties, a couple can have a second child.”

In statements over the last decade, the Chinese regime repeatedly has denied that its policies force women to have abortions. Instead, Chinese officials say, women are encouraged to have abortions and are given education about the wisdom of doing so after they have already had one child.

Officials in charge of family planning in China’s central government long have maintained that any instances of forced abortion are the result of overzealous local officials, who often are given numerical limits or targets for the number of births allowed in their areas.

The only forerunner of Thursday’s ruling came last August, when then-Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III announced new guidelines in which the INS was instructed to give “careful consideration” to Chinese who apply for asylum on grounds that they may be persecuted because they refuse to undergo abortions or sterilizations in their homeland.

However, Meese’s guidelines did not have the force of law and officials said that three Chinese to whom Meese granted asylum on those grounds previously had been admitted into this country. Lee, by contrast, came here without a visa in the first place.

At his court hearings, Lee testified that, after his second son was born in 1982, Chinese officials fined him the equivalent of $500, denied him work and asked him to have a vasectomy.

He avoided the vasectomy by signing a letter guaranteeing not to have any more children.

Wife Tried to Hide

Last year, Lee testified, after his wife became pregnant for the third time, she left home and sought to hide in her mother-in-law’s village. But local officials there discovered the pregnancy and forced her to have an abortion.

In response to Lee’s claims, INS officials argued in court that he was undeserving of sympathy because he had left his family.

In addition, they contended that China’s family planning policies generally apply to everyone in the country, no matter what their political or religious beliefs, and that therefore Lee could not claim he was being singled out for persecution.

Jon Wu, Lee’s lawyer, insisted that even if the ruling is upheld, it will not open the floodgates for large numbers of Chinese to win political asylum in this country.

“We’ve got a huge ocean,” Wu said. “There will not be millions walking across. It (China) is not like Mexico.”