NEW BLOOD, NEW HOPES
Winerip, Michael
NEW BLOOD, NEW HOPES By Michael Winerip She was new, and had never been away from Haiti, so Danielle Lafond listened carefully to what the other Haitian women were saying about America. You...
...They have been given a special "extended voluntary departure status" by INS...
...It's amazing...
...And the Mexicans have a constituency here...
...Twice in the last year small wooden boats broke up in stormy seas off Palm Beach, drowning 53...
...She was a high school graduate and had worked as a factory supervisor in Haiti...
...detention camps, but there is no guarantee they will be able to stay in the country...
...In May, Danielle Lafond was let out...
...As did their predecessors, they likely would start out in the ghetto, working the jobs no one else wants, living through their, children...
...They were not allowed to visit each other...
...U.S...
...Bureau of Prison officials are replacing INS guards...
...These people come without compasses...
...A smaller group of Nicaraguans also fits this special category...
...Nor should the amount of effort required to arrive in America be the only consideration...
...Moreover, like almost all illegal immigrants, the Haitians give the United States government much more than they get back...
...government...
...They were fleeing a leftist Sandinista government," says Brodyaga, "so of course the INS looked favorably on their chance for asylum...
...Immigrants are hardly the drag on society many believe them to be...
...It's good propaganda...
...Model Prisoners What's so perverse is that the Haitians—who symbolize everything we should want from an immigrant group—are treated much worse than other immigrants...
...To make his trip here Simon Salomon found an old boat and spent days on the Port-au-Prince docks figuring how big an engine he needed to reach Miami...
...It was not a hard place to sneak into...
...Only the latter are eligible for release on bond, pending an asylum hearing...
...Sometimes, but many jobs are so menial and so low paying that Americans won't take them—or stay in them...
...The INS judges placed a check mark in the "asylum denied" column...
...Again, the best way to do that is also the most natural—to make it hard to immigrate, but to reward with freedom those most willing to suffer for the privilege...
...I was looking on both sides of it, the dangers of being pregnant and the advantages of being released...
...When New York Mayor Ed Koch was asked recently what he thought accounted for improved school test scores, he said the new immigrants—the Latin Americans and Africans who work hard and care about their neighborhoods and families...
...The Golden Door women were right: the U.S...
...There is, of course, a humanitarian reason for letting such immigrants in, but there is also a simple economic reason...
...District Court Judge James King discovered the INS's method for keeping track of Haitian asylum cases...
...Danielle Lafond began having "conversations" with a man she had known, but had never encouraged, back in Haiti...
...During a 1980 lawsuit, U.S...
...I knew quite well how to prevent being pregnant...
...Others, crowded into hidden compartments for as long as two weeks, have dropped dead from dehydration just as they arrived on the beach...
...They're not an aggressive people," Ruiz says...
...Peter Nimkoff, a former assistant U.S...
...Yet the Haitians have not been the only nationality coming into the U.S...
...In that case the appeals court ruled that the government had not, in fact, discriminated by detaining 53 Haitians while releasing most non-Haitians from the INS Processing Center in Brooklyn...
...They have nothing but their wits to rely on...
...I'm the oldest...
...attorney for the INS, declined a case two years ago because he could not bring himself to support the government decision to deny Haitians work permits...
...One can draw a distinction between the immigrant who simply steps across the border into Texas, or stays on after his student visa has expired, or lands at Kennedy Airport after a relaxing trip, and the immigrant who almost drowned or braved a hairraising journey of thousands of miles...
...A future Einstein should be allowed to take the Concorde over if he wants to...
...During their detention, there have been no rapes, no homosexual attacks, no muggings—none of the behavior that characterized some of the Cubans who came on the Mariel boatlift (see "Castro's Revenge," March 1982...
...When the government decides it wants to get tough on immigration," says Ira Kurzban, a Miami attorney who has represented Haitians for several years, "it always draws the line with Haitians...
...To thwart that desire, especially one that burns so intensely, harms not only the immigrants, but the rest of us...
...Only once, in 1980, for a few months under President Carter, were Haitians designated legal entrants...
...They visited the Golden Door often...
...While the Cubans have contributed heavily to a rising crime rate in Miami, the Haitians have committed very few crimes...
...Poles also do...
...I came to work...
...Do they take jobs away from 'Americans...
...But the policy changed in the summer of 1981, and under Reagan's tough immigration stance, 1,800 Haitians were locked away in American detention camps for up to a year while INS considered their asylum claims...
...There is a new president, and this is his new rule...
...A small window-frame manufacturer in Houston, for instance, was raided this spring by the INS, and 92 jobs held by illegal aliens were opened up to Americans...
...Cecilio Ruiz, until recently director of the Krome camp, says he was so short of staff last year—at one point he had 26 guards for 1,000 Haitians—that it would have been impossible to run an orderly transition if the Haitians weren't so cooperative...
...had allowed only burghers and no peasants), it is not the most economically sensible way to distinguish between immigrant groups...
...The government says it created a policy that happened to affect so many Haitians because that's who was coming to this country at the time...
...Haitians are being impacted by the detention policy to a greater degree," he wrote...
...A Suffering Standard The Haitians don't fit the economic profile that has characterized other groups that have gained refugee status from the U.S...
...Immigration statutes are designed to favor people with specialized skills, even if those skills entail nothing more than an earlier career as a bureaucrat...
...And the Reagan administration certainly isn't going to help...
...The Haitian boat people—fleeing the poorest and one of the most repressive countries in the Western Hemisphere— have been the first group of refugees seeking political asylum to be detained without hope of being released on bond since Ellis Island was closed in 1 9 A54f.ter a 13-month legal battle 1,800 have been released from U.S...
...This is contrary to the public's incorrect perception that aliens come to this country and become wards of the state...
...I know what it's like...
...But the distinction is a useful one nonetheless, and immigration policy should be flexible enough to take account of it...
...She would run through it, sitting in the lobby of the run-down Miami Beach hotel where she was being held...
...Danielle, only 22, was to be the great hope of her family, the savior, the one who would get a job in America and send money home...
...So what do you do if you want to show how tough you can be...
...The evidence of what grit and determination can mean comes not just from the early part of the century, when immigrants who had braved many hardships to get here helped build the country...
...They would, that is, if we gave them the chance...
...Eventually, when the spirit and industriousness and love of America bears fruit, they would, for the most part, become a driving force behind economic growth...
...Not so her traveling mates...
...Nor did U.S...
...recently in significant numbers who fall into the non-bondable category...
...Of all Miami's ethnic neighborhoods, Little Haiti—population 500,000—has the lowest crime rate...
...This means the government will not give most Haitians official "refugee" status, and they are considered illegal immigrants...
...Richard A. Marshall, Jr., the assistant U.S...
...Attorneys Robert Boyer of Miami and Lisa Brodyaga of Los Fresnos, Texas, represented 35 undocumented Nicaraguans entering this country during the same period the INS detained undocumented Haitians...
...I keep thinking I have five children, two brothers, a wife, a mother, two sisters in Haiti...
...Skills can be acquired...
...She thought about why she had come, and that only increased the pressure to act...
...Men from Miami's Little Haiti had heard about the women who wanted to be free...
...The Golden Door, immigration authorities called the place—from the line in the Statue of Liberty poem...
...I'm a sailor...
...The Nicaraguans were released...
...Others have sold their small farms to raise the $800 to $1,200 needed to make the trip...
...You pick on a group that it is not numerous...
...The government cannot and will not address the most substantive immigration problem— the Mexicans—because agribusiness needs cheap labor and we need Mexican oil...
...The plain truth is that the government is not required to treat aliens with anything approaching evenhandedness...
...He bartered for the engine, brought along 50 extra spark plugs, and organized his 42 passengers in such a way that not one knew any of the others—so no one could go to the Haitian secret police...
...I didn't want to be part of a situation of detaining a people who came that many miles, who wanted so bad to be here...
...It can be found today too...
...The Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform bill currently pending in Congress will not help them, for this group came too late to be included in the bill's moratorium period...
...Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) grants "humanitarian" paroles for pregnancy...
...Her mother, a seamstress, had borrowed $800—an enormous sum in Haiti, where the average yearly income is $300—to pay the smuggler...
...Though the INS has done everything in its power to get rid of them, the Haitians have persevered...
...Women and children have drowned when smuggling captains, afraid of being caught with the evidence, have forced them into the sea...
...I would like to keep my head up," says JeanClaude Dominique, who suffered a nervous breakdown during asylum hearings...
...Two months later, INS went back for a follow-up inspection and 68 of the Americans had already quit...
...Unlike Poles or Soviet Jews or Cuban refugees, Haitians are fleeing a country the U.S...
...Aside from betraying an implicit elitism (imagine if at the turn of the century the U.S...
...You don't want a get-tough policy against a group that might cause you internal problems...
...A Mexican who traveled hundreds of miles across rugged terrain and used his wits to survive qualifies...
...But it happened I was locked up and I had to get out, and getting pregnant was a way not to be deported...
...They just turn up on the beach one day...
...It's not my fault...
...It's unfortunate, but this pattern of turnover in menial jobs, while lessened somewhat by the recession, exists throughout the country...
...Only five percent of Haitian boat people have held white-collar jobs, compared with a third of the Hungarian immigrants in recent years, half the Indochinese, and two thirds of the Soviet Jews and Cubans...
...As the months passed, the thought took over all others in the young woman's mind...
...In truth, illegal immigrants who are working—a large percentage—have taxes withheld from their paychecks...
...We had to yell through the fences," said the husband...
...To Danielle Lafond it was prison...
...Last year it decided detention would be a permanent part of this country's immigration policy and proceeded to spend $150 million turning temporary sites like Krome camp in Florida into permanent facilities, with higher barbed-wire fences, prison-style monitoring equipment, and recreation facilities...
...Court of Appeals for the second circuit noted in a June 1982 opinion...
...What are the qualities of the people being subjected to such treatment...
...Historically, people willing to brave such risks in order to make a better life, if not for themselves then for their children, have been the strength of the American economy...
...When it comes to Haitians, though, they usually don't...
...If that is not a specific policy prescription, it should at least suggest the short-sightedness of the U.S...
...calls an ally...
...They bypass embassies, consuls, airport security...
...You will only go free, they told her, if you have a baby—that's how the other 20 got released...
...But Poles have been freed immediately...
...I didn't come to this country to get pregnant," she says...
...I just can't...
...Michael Winerip coveredimmigration issues for The Miami Herald...
...Apart From Poles Romer St...
...Jilles and his wife, Lillian, were in Krome for over a year, separated by three barbedwire fences...
...What can't be—what must come over on the boat—is the determination for a better life that has always been the secret of American success, economic or otherwise...
...Meanwhile, few register to become eligible for welfare or other government benefits for fear of being discovered...
...A city of Miami worker testified in the same case that she took a Haitian to Miami's INS office one day that summer and found Cubans waiting inside while Haitians stood in the hot sun in back of the building...
...Even now, long after word of the detention camps has filtered back to Haiti, they keep coming, risking everything in their little boats...
...I have two kids in Haiti...
...This distinction does not solely reflect national origins...
...It was hard to talk about anything personal," said the wife...
...Historically, people willing to bear great hardship to reach the United States have been a driving force behind economic growth...
...attorney defending the INS detention policy, resigned in December 1981, after several months of preparing the government case in support of detention...
...In fact, these mostly rural boat people have impressed even their jailers with their law-abiding ways...
...They're all depending on me...
...policy toward Haitian refugees...
...The Haitians fit this profile...
...But the primary reason for that circumstance was not the Haitians but the 125,000 Cubans allowed by Castro to leave the port of Mariel...
...There was no "asylum granted" column...
...Congress regularly makes rules [for aliens] that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens," the U.S...
...When the immigration restrictions were eased temporarily for the Cubans, some Haitians gained entry as well...
...The Haitians fit this profile...
...immigration policy distinguishes between those refugees apprehended at their points of entry and those caught elsewhere after their arrival in the country...
...It said, 'Haitians to the rear.' " The Reagan administration says it has not singled out the Haitians or treated them differently from any other undocumented aliens...
...Her baby is due in two months...
...She had not considered herself common, nor had others...
...You pick on the Haitians...
...District Judge Eugene Spellman, who ordered the June release of the 1,800 detainees, feel the Haitians' lawyers had proved legal discrimination in their case...
...A number of Haitians want to get to America so badly they'll risk dying on the way...
...There doesn't seem to be much reason why people willing to work the longest and hardest at these jobs shouldn't get a crack at them...
...However, Judge Spellman did agree that more Haitians were detained for longer periods of time than nonHaitians...
...There was a sign...
Vol. 14 • December 1982 • No. 10
