One in a Million

At New York's Idlewild Airport last week a ten-year-old boy bounded down the steps of a chartered Pan American flight from Munich. Young Andrejs Suritis was born in a Bavarian displaced persons camp to Latvian parents who originally fled Riga in 1944, hours ahead of the Red army. Now he was bound for Kalamazoo, Mich., where his mother already has a job as a seamstress and his father expects to find work as a radio technician.

On the same plane were 79 other Europeans cleared for immigration into the U.S., including a biochemist, whose entry into the U.S. was being sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. In recent years tens of thousands of immigrants like the Suritis had streamed through New York, causing little more stir than an 8:04 commuter train coming from Long Island.

But by one of the standard miracles of pressagentry, it had been determined that Andrejs was the one-millionth European helped financially or otherwise to emigrate since the U.S. and 28 other nations created the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration. In its eight years the agency has assisted 179,000 Europeans to migrate to the United States. Another 290,000 went to Australia, 252,000 were settled in South America. The agency pays transportation, conducts language courses, provides orientation information about the migrants' new country. Total expenses: $270 million (up to 45% supplied by the U.S.).

ICEM has all but cleared out the displaced persons camps, besides handling great surges of Iron Curtain escapees such as occurred after the Hungarian revolt. In the words of its officials, it has become ''the biggest travel agency on earth."

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