Some White House policies are proudly announced. Others just sort of ooze out when nobody’s looking.
That was how the Bush administration quietly–but radically–changed its refugee policy last December to discriminate against Haitian asylum seekers. Under the new policy that the administration imposed after a large boatload of Haitians landed in Florida last December, the Haitian asylum seekers were locked up for months without a bond hearing. Most of those 187 refugees remain locked up almost a year later.
The problem with Haitian refugees remained mostly out of the minds of most Americans until last week, when the nationally televised sight of 220 Haitians jumping ship last week into a Miami harbor revived many memories.
The episode also should remind Americans about how the instability of an impoverished and embattled country, like Haiti, spills over onto its neighbors’ shores.
News coverage and commentaries do not help the public understand the shabby treatment inflicted on Haitian boat people with the preferential treatment awarded to Cuban refugees.
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Let’s give the discredit to where it is due. The issue is the conflict between the shabby way our refugee policy treats asylum seekers from Haiti versus the fair way it treats those from everyplace else.
In December, the Bush administration quietly created three distinct refugee policies.
– At one extreme are those fortunate Cuban refugees who, upon their arrival on dry USA land, receive fast-track preferential treatment under what’s left of this nation’s Cold War crusade to topple Fidel Castro.
– In the middle is just about everybody else. Asylum seekers from Colombia, Zimbabwe, Iraq, North Korea and elsewhere are routinely released from custody on bond once the Immigration and Naturalization Service has determined that the asylum seekers have a credible fear of persecution if they are returned to their homeland.
– But not Haitians. They are detained, without any right to bond hearings, until their cases are heard.
President Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, didn’t like it. It played havoc with his relations with South Florida’s economically thriving Haitian community.
But his biggest Haitian headache was not to come until a couple of days before Halloween–and a week before Election Day–when television cameras caught a boatload of Haitian asylum seekers jumping from a wooden freighter into shallow waters and scrambling onto a major Miami highway, tying up traffic and startling the heck out of afternoon drivers.
Quicker than you could say “homeland security,” Rep. Carrie Meek (D-Fla.) confronted Gov. Bush and demanded that he “call your brother,” the president, “and ask him to release those Haitians.”
The startled Jeb responded that he already has talked to his brother about the “unfairness” of the policy. He later announced that he had heard from Washington that the administration was looking for a solution, although, “I don’t know if they’re going to do anything.”
Some defenders of President Bush have decided it is more appropriate to criticize Meek, the Congressional Black Caucus and anybody else who has supported Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (“The Black Caucus’ boat people,” sneered the headline on an anti-Meek editorial in The Wall Street Journal.)
Aristide, you may recall, was restored to power eight years ago with the help of U.S. troops sent in by President Bill Clinton at the Black Caucus’ urging to oust the military junta that had overthrown the democratically elected Aristide.
But as I found during my own reporting from Port au Prince last summer, it is hard to say just how much in charge Aristide is these days.
Paranoid, perhaps as a result of having been ousted once, Aristide has given too free of a hand to the grass-roots “Popular Organizations,” who revere him but also have created roving bands of paramilitary squads led by warlords who terrorize anyone who displeases them.
Aristide’s American critics call for his removal from office, but offer no clue as to who might replace him. His opposition includes some of the same brutal forces who overthrew democracy before.
Neither the INS, the U.S. Department of Justice nor the White House has presented much of a justification for the new Haitian detention policy. That lack of accountability has left some Haitian-Americans and others to wonder whether it might be racially motivated.
Gee, I wonder where they got that idea?
There are no easy diplomatic solutions for Haiti. But as Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has said, one does not provide solutions in foreign policy so much as one must constantly and relentlessly manage problems.
Establishing democratic rule in Haiti was a big problem. The maintenance of democracy there calls for more attention and management from the United States. A great nation looks for ways to help its weak neighbors, not just discriminate against them.
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