HUDDLED MASSES DEPARTMENT: Some boat people are more equal than others.
Zucker, Naomi Flink
HUDDLED MUSSES DEPARTMENT: Some Boat People Are More Equal than Others BY NAOMI FLINKZUCKER Ahalf-starved band of Haitians was found marooned on the island of Cayo Lobos more than a year ago....
...The Reagan Administration maintains that Haitians come only for economic reasons and are not entitled to political asylum...
...At Fort Drum, the Haitians would have little community support, and few attorneys or Creole interpreters...
...The most common, expressed by many in the State Department, is that extralegal flight from a Communist country is a traitorous act punishable by a term in prison...
...Miami Federal District Court Judge James L. King held in 1979 that "the decision was made among high INS officials to expel Haitians, despite whatever claims to asylum individual Haitians might have...
...But thousands of others, many of whom have asked for asylum in this country, have been imprisoned by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS...
...they might, it was said, need medical attention...
...Though in the end asylum is almost always denied, these same attorneys have more than once sued successfully for due process and fair hearings...
...The National Council of Churches, on behalf of the refugees, reached a written agreement with the Immigration and Naturalization Service that Haitians who had applied for political asylum would be given work permits...
...vessels suspected of attempting to violate U.S...
...But it is not just poverty that drives the Haitians to perilous seaborne escape...
...They run from Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duva-lier and his rapacious security forces, who subsist on what they can extort from the populace...
...Polls show that 91 per cent of Americans favor an 'all out effort' to stop illegal immigration, which is the highest of any country in the world...
...Those who answered the government call did not return...
...camps...
...Television camera crews, before they were driven off, recorded most of the scene...
...Frequently the Haitians are threatened and intimidated, told that they must either return to Haiti or spend the rest of their lives in detention...
...Those who survive can expect to live only forty-six more years and will probably suffer from malnutrition and its accompanying illnesses...
...The dramas in the courtrooms have had a certain unreality over the months...
...Other recommendations have met with resistance from Haitian support groups and civil libertarians...
...law" was implemented in September...
...but when, in October of 1980, the flow of Cubans had been stemmed, the Government resumed its earlier practice, and Haitian support groups resumed their suits...
...judge...
...The Krome Avenue camp outside Miami is one of the most notorious of the facilities in which Haitians are held today...
...immigration law, in a reflection of Cold War policy, defined refugees as people in flight from Communist-dominated countries or Middle East countries...
...Haiti, the argument continues, has no such law...
...Instead, the INS solidified a policy to do away with the Haitian "impact" on U.S...
...There were well-rehearsed speeches and bountiful gifts of food, clothing, and cash for the unsuccessful emigrants...
...Haitian boats have been landing on our shores since 1971, but it was during the Carter Presidency that the number of Haitians living in Florida began to grow significantly...
...The INS office then was swamped with applications for permits, even from those who had not asked for political asylum...
...Another, brought in the summer of 1981, asked again for fair asylum hearings...
...Judge Hastings, a usually light-humored man, railed at the Government attorney, 'You're playing a human shell game9 Locked up in such camps—in Florida, Kentucky, West Virginia, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico—the Haitians have, of course, rebelled...
...And while these suits are pending another is being heard— one which seeks to bring an end to the detention of Haitians in the crude.U.S...
...Desperation pushes these black boat people to sell what little they own and pay a smuggler to bring them on overloaded craft to what they have heard is the richest and most democratic country in the world...
...The INS called these "immediate action cases," and its agents still believe that any person who flees from a Marxist-ruled country has done so out of political conviction, while Haitians (and Salvadorans) have come only for economic betterment...
...Why in the face of such opposition do the Haitians continue to come...
...immigration policies racist...
...Also uncounted are those who fled their country in unseaworthy boats and never reached land...
...But while our refugee policy is built on Cold War alliances, our asylum practices discriminate against the poor...
...When Bahamian police, armed with pistols, clubs, and teargas, rounded them up to send them back to Haiti, they resisted with sticks and bottles and seashells, and cried out that they would rather die than return home...
...The practice, he ruled, was "offensive to every notion of constitutional due process and equal protection...
...There, in one of the windowless cubbyholes tucked behind a storefront, he told his story...
...INS statistics show that fewer Haitians came in 1981 as compared to the year before, but in 1980, with the flood of Cubans and the open-arms welcome, more felt free to report to the INS...
...Baby Doc's regime has been labeled "the most repressive government in the Americas" by one U.S...
...Immigration is pushed by poverty and unemployment in the sending countries, particularly Mexico, and pulled by the ease of entry and offers of work in this country at relatively high wages...
...No public announcement of the change in policy was made, but an internal INS memo refers to "the [INS] Commissioner's understanding with the White House and the Department of Justice" that the work permits would be revoked...
...The real test will be this spring, when the Caribbean is again calm and less daunting to the boatmen who traffic in refugees...
...The Communist-country preference was gone from the law, but persisted in practice...
...About 3,200 Haitians spent last Christmas in U.S...
...Now, they are still coming, but secretly...
...refugees from the governments of right-wing allies were certain to be turned away...
...Concern has been heightened by the mass influx of Cubans and Haitians into South Florida, and the continuing arrivals of refugees from other parts of the globe...
...Even those in hiding come eventually to the city's Haitian Refugee Center for help...
...Officials on board the cutters assigned to interdiction duty decide Haitian asylum claims on the spot...
...The task force called for "international negotiations...
...Rationalizations for the bias abound...
...But in March 1980, Congress passed the first major revision of relevant U.S...
...The most profound effects of the Mariel boatlift, however, were not to be felt by either those Cubans or the Haitians who, through the spring and summer of 1980, reached the United States...
...Some civil rights leaders put a sharper point on it and call current U.S...
...Americans perceive this as a major problem...
...detention camps...
...Surmising that they had been arrested, the young man went into hiding, on an island off the coast of Haiti...
...A VISTA volunteer who worked at Krome has called it "a concentration camp...
...The Government has, indeed, for the past ten years, played a human shell game with the Haitian refugees, keeping them hidden in jails and detention camps, shifting them from one location to another, sending them surreptitiously back to Haiti, keeping them one shell away from their supporters...
...Suddenly Judge Alcee Hastings, a generally light-humored man, stiffened and railed at the Government attorney: "You're playing a human shell game...
...What remains unsaid, however, is that Haiti is ruled not by law but by the caprice of its dictator...
...And the Haitians sit and wait and wonder...
...The Haitians respond with the only weapons they have: protest, hunger strikes, attempts at escape...
...In December, the Reverend Jesse Jackson blasted the hypocrisy of Reagan's open-arms welcome to Poles in the face of a steadfast rejection of Haitians...
...The State Department, after passage of the 1980 law, established new guidelines for processing refugees: Asylum requests from Communist countries were deemed "politically sensitive...
...Shortly after his election, Ronald Reagan appointed a task force to confront the problem of illegal immigration...
...They proposed that undocumented aliens be "detained" while awaiting disposition of their asylum claims and that exclusion proceedings be "expedited...
...There is, furthermore, no appeal, and Haitians unable to support their claims are immediately returned to their country...
...The young Haitian has been joined by uncounted others still coming to the United States...
...Rather, the Haitians offend the three biases that underlie our refugee policy: the Haitians have the unique misfortune to come from an anti-Communist country, to be poor and uneducated, and to be on the leading edge of masses of people like themselves...
...The Administration's most recent plan calls for the incarceration of the Haitians in Fort Drum, New York, thirty miles from the Canadian border, prompting comparisons with Siberian concentration camps...
...It was the Mariel boatlift that actually stopped the deportations...
...The Krome administrators said there were too many inmates in the camp...
...Meanwhile, some Floridians in the House of Representatives, alarmed at the drain on state resources caused by the Haitian influx, asked for Federal assistance for their state...
...Thus virtually any refugee from a Communist country was assured asylum in this country...
...Certainly our Haitian policy has a racist pall about it, but racism is not the simple root cause...
...Another goal of the INS has been the hampering of any assistance to the Haitians...
...We are asking why you treat us this way," wrote one woman detained in Puerto Rico...
...Because it recognized that no policy of interdiction would discourage every Haitian escapee, the task force dealt as well with the problem of those who do reach Florida and ask for asylum...
...A Justice Department appeal of Judge King's order is pending...
...As the members sat down to write their report, they kept in mind the country's enduring streak of natiyism: "Apart from the concern with overall numbers of immigrants, there is also concern over the composition 6f immigration...
...Despite this, however, civil rights lawyers in Miami have gained access to some refugees and have entered asylum claims on their behalf...
...Of every 1,000 infants born in Haiti, 150 will die in their first year...
...Our immigration laws have discriminated against the poor and the non-Anglo-Saxon from the time when steerage class passengers were examined at Ellis Island and cabin class were admitted without examination," says Monsignor Bryan O. Walsh, who has worked with refugees in Florida for twenty-five years...
...The access of attorneys to their clients is restricted and the entire asylum process geared to a single goal—deportation...
...Though few Americans would go so far as to barricade their doors against their new neighbors, many have begun to believe we would do well to defend the country's dwindling resources against a tide of strangers...
...One challenges the legality of detention...
...Krome squats on the eastern edge of the Florida Everglades...
...The task force also took note of economic pressures: "Pressures to immigrate to the United States continue to increase at a time of inflation, unemployment, and necessary cuts in social programs...
...The stage was set with tents and a banner that read "Welcome to Haiti...
...An estimated 44,000 have fled since Baby Doc took over from his dictator father in 1971, when Francois Duvalier died...
...This time he made it to Florida, where he went into hiding...
...communities...
...Is it because we are Negroes...
...The White House then urged the INS to revoke the work authorizations...
...A suit filed in 1979 by the National Council of Churches includes the charge that the INS broke a legally binding agreement, but the Haitians still have no work permits...
...From there, he managed to escape, evading the gunboats that patrol Haiti's waters...
...The recommendation that the Coast Guard "interdict on the high seas...
...By late December, the Coast Guard had intercepted only one boat and turned back the fifty-seven passengers, but the Administration claimed that the presence of the cutters deterred the refugee flotilla...
...were prepared for the return of the refugees and took care to avoid embarrassing television coverage...
...Nor were the effects of the boatlift limited, as many imagine, to the social and economic impact on Florida and resettlement areas around the country...
...One day last September, as torpid Miami air-conditioned itself almost to stone-coldness and the city's boisterous vitality was shut out by dark paneled walls in the Federal courthouse, the anger and conviction of both the supporters and opponents of the Haitian cause were subdued in polite legal confrontation...
...They have been given Special Entrant Status and will probably be permitted to remain in the country...
...The Haitian community in Miami is close and supportive of newcomers...
...Here they find neither riches nor freedom...
...Inspectors noted standing waste water, garbage, flies, filth, and overcrowding...
...But the motive that has always loomed largest in the minds of the policymakers— even before the 1980 wave of 125,000 Cubans who came on the Mariel boatlift—is the fear of opening the floodgates to mass emigration from the Caribbean...
...Simple justice and human rights count for little in the Duvalier scheme of things...
...Due process, thus, may be jettisoned...
...to provide additional resettlement opportunities for Haitians to Western Hemisphere countries"—something Haitian refugee advocates proposed long ago...
...Nine months later, one of those who had been returned to Haiti from Cayo Lobos managed to escape once more...
...Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference accused the Administration last October of having a "discriminatory attitude toward black refugees...
...And in practice, though not in law, Haiti has imprisoned many of those who returned from the United States...
...At policy-making levels, prejudice clothes itself in euphemism...
...Since these hearings are conducted at sea, the proceedings are not, in the words of the task force, "governed by the immigration act...
...Judge King ordered a temporary halt to the deportations...
...The Refugee Act of 1980 now defines a refugee as "any person . . . who is unable or unwilling to return to . . . [his or her] country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion...
...Buildings were locked during the day, and there was no shade or water to provide respite from the Florida sun...
...In place of the random and personal persecutions of their homeland, they find an impersonal but organized persecution in the United States...
...One State Department spokesman put it bluntly: "If we let in the Haitians, we will have to let in half of South America and Africa...
...Late last summer, after a prolonged drought, water stood all around the barbed wire fences...
...The Florida Health Department had inspected the camp and found the water, waste facilities, buildings, beds and bedding, bath facilities, and housekeeping all unsatisfactory...
...Their solution to overcrowding: Restrict the use of showers, toilets, and lavatories to between 6 and 8 a.m...
...They come from one of the poorest countries in the world, the poorest in the Western Hemisphere...
...For the rest of the day, only portable toilets and a single sink were to be used...
...Back at Port-au-Prince, the authorities Naomi Flink Zucker, a free-lance writer living in Kingston, Rhode Island, is at work on a book about U. S. refugee policy...
...attorneys to "show that these are unusual cases dealing with individuals that are threatening the community's well-being— socially and economically...
...Reporters noted, however, that many of the "Red Cross workers" were armed, and plainclothes police thwarted any attempts to interview the refugees...
...From Port-au-Prince, the exiles returned to their homes, where they were left alone until media attention waned...
...So the Haitians remain locked up while attorneys argue for hearings on their asylum claims—that given the political realities in Haiti, it is likely the returned refugees would be beaten or killed as soon as the media forgot about them...
...At a private meeting, Deputy Director Mario Noto said the Haitian cases were "volatile" and instructed the U.S...
...While Washington champions the struggles of working people halfway around the globe, the struggles of our Haitian neighbors are seen not as heroic, but as pitiful and bothersome...
...Although the Government claims its policies deter the Haitian tide, they only force larger numbers of Haitians underground...
...But after a month, the notice went out that the government wanted to see the Cayo Lobos people...
...In his place, the young man's mother and father were arrested...
...The boatlift had its greatest effect on the subsequent waves of refugees, whose numbers policymakers would now curtail...
...In April 1980, however, the worst fears of the Government were realized when the floodgates were breached, not by Haitians but by the long-favored Cubans...
...The overwhelming impression most Americans have gotten from coverage of such disruptions is that the Haitians are a threatening lot...
...As support for the Haitian cause grew stronger, the Administration grew nervous...
...Some members of Congress and the public fear that newly arriving immigrants and refugees will not be assimilated into the national 'melting pot' and that one or a few language groups, particularly the His-panics, have come to dominate immigration...
...For many years, U.S...
...The poor are now called economic migrants...
...The image was startling...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
