Monday, Jun. 22, 1981
Sending Them Back to Haiti
The U.S. gets tough with one country's "boatpeople"
The young man, handsome but for some missing teeth, is resolute. "If they mean to return me to Haiti, they can shoot me, they can kill me, I am not going back," he declares. "I am not going back to that life of nothing." The man is an inmate at Krome Avenue North Detention Center, in Dade County, Fla., a federal compound of tents and concrete barracks that holds 1,160 of his countrymen. They are among 13,000 Haitians who had the misfortune to arrive in the U.S. after Oct. 10, the Carter Administration's cut off date for immigration amnesty.
Last week eleven Krome Avenue North residents were herded through a quick immigration hearing in Miami, then put on a jet back to Port-au-Prince. They were the first to be sent home under a new U.S. policy of deporting all Haitians who have arrived illegally since mid-May. (Last year more than 20,000 entered the U.S. legitimately.) Seventy-six more Haitians have been found similarly unacceptable and ordered to leave, but await judicial review of their cases, which will begin this week. If the Immigration and Naturalization Service has its way--as a Cabinet task force will shortly recommend--flights back to Haiti will become common, and the surge of illegal Haitian immigrants may be staunched.
Every week as many as 600 Haitians land in rickety craft on south Florida beaches. For more than two years, lax official attitudes and a tangle of litigation prevented the INS from rounding up the illegals and shipping them home. But a court in December freed the INS to throw out unauthorized Haitians, and the agency has just begun doing so.
Civil libertarians and social workers, however, claim the new INS policy, which permits perfunctory, closed hearings, is unfair to the bewildered, mostly illiterate Haitians. Critics challenge the Government's presumption that Haitians come here for economic reasons, and are thus not eligible for political asylum. Most Cuban arrivals, by contrast, are assumed to be fleeing from Communism. Some lawyers for the refugees charge it is racist to single out Haitians, 95% of whom are black, for exclusion.
The immediate intention of the new, firmer measures is to rid the U.S. of the most recently arrived Haitian illegals, but officials also hope to discourage would-be immigrants still in Haiti. Explains an INS staff member: "We can't be home to the world's poor. It's as simple as that."
But nowhere in this hemisphere are there so many people so poor as in Haiti (pop. 6 million; per capita income, less than $300), and thus so eager to scrape together as much as $1,500 for the trip to Florida. The passage is usually unpleasant, sometimes fatal. Raymond Antoine, 46, is a Krome Avenue North inmate who spent five weeks in a small boat with 148 fellow Haitians. Asked why he persevered, he said, "Mise, misee [Poverty, poverty!] My eight children are starving. I have to get work, money to feed them from here."
The INS contends that such motives have nothing to do with politics, that Haiti's once notorious government repression has subsided in the past decade and the immigrants will probably not be punished as they are returned. Indeed, the Haitian authorities are making no real effort to halt the exodus: the 400,000-member exile community in the U.S. sends perhaps $100 million back to their families on the island every year, and the escape route tempers unemployment and hopelessness.
Yet no matter how fast the U.S. deports the Haitians, their bleak prospects will doubtless continue to prod them toward a country that does not want them. "I will try again and keep trying," asserted one man still in Haiti and eager to leave.
"At least in jail in America I'll have a roof and meals." qed
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