It sounds kinda neat, as the Americans might say. Pick up the whole exiled Hmong community living in a refugee camp in Thailand, fly them out in planeloads, and resettle them in the United States. A fitting end, one might think, to the Indo-China war, during which Hmong fighters from Laos helped the CIA fight the communists. But there's a catch.
They may have been valiant heroes in helping the US and Thailand fight off the communist menace in Laos in the early 1970s, but only some of them and their families look set to catch those planes. Many are caught in bureaucratic limbo or suffer because of exaggerated drug-addiction fears.
'It is sad to say that the US government, which actively recruited these uneducated and illiterate hill tribe people, has taken such a strong and stubborn stance not to allow any Hmong drug addicts to settle in the United States,' said Joe Davy, associate director of Hmong International Human Rights Watch in the US.
The truth is that many of these addicts were former CIA soldiers who were wounded in action and used opium as a painkiller, only to get addicted. The US Embassy in Thailand has so far not been very sympathetic.
Over the past two decades, opium addiction among a few refugees was used largely as an excuse to shunt them around Thailand. Most ended up at a makeshift camp at Tham Krabok Buddhist temple, where monks weaned addicts off opium. This rundown camp is now the focus of a programme to resettle exiled Lao Hmong and 'end the problem' for Thailand.
But as Mr Davy points out, this still leaves 35,000 refugees living illegally outside the camp, after they were refused registration by the authorities. Over the border in Laos, a shrinking, starving community of their kin is facing a massacre in the jungle by communist soldiers. Some recent refugee arrivals have fled this fighting.