Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese allies were in danger of recriminations from the Communists, but Joe Biden insisted that “the United States has no obligation to evacuate one — or 100,001 — South Vietnamese.”
Republican President Gerald Ford said: “The United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants of all countries. We’ve always been a humanitarian nation. We felt that a number of these South Vietnamese deserved an opportunity to live in freedom.”
Biden objected and called for a meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to voice his objections to Ford’s funding request for these efforts. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who led the meeting, told the senators that “the total list of the people endangered in Vietnam is over a million” and that “the irreducible list is 174,000.”
Biden said U.S. allies should not be rescued: “We should focus on getting them [the U.S. troops] out. Getting the Vietnamese out and military aid for the GVN [South Vietnam’s government] are totally different.”
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.”
Ford was upset with Biden’s response, believing that failing to evacuate the South Vietnamese would be a betrayal of American values: “We opened our door to the Hungarians … Our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don't think these people should be treated any differently from any other people — the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended that 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 conference 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. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/7/1925423/-Biden-Fought-to-Keep-Out-Vietnamese-Refugees-from-the-US-in-1975
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