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Title: Debate grows in aftermath of quake: Should U.S. let more Haitians immigrate?
Source:
Washington Post
URL Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy ... 010012402723.html?hpid=topnews
Published: Jan 25, 2010
Author: Amy Goldstein and Peter Whoriskey
Post Date: 2010-01-25 19:45:04 by scrapper2
Keywords: immigration debate, should disaster determine immi, more Haitian immigrants?, what do they offer America?
Views: 110
Comments: 9
From morning until night, Dieula Celestin's cellphone rings in Miami's Little Haiti. It is her younger brother, Roger Paul, calling from Port-au-Prince, where he and their 65-year-old mother live with no food, no job and no money in the street outside the remnants of their house. Celestin knows that federal immigration rules forbid her brother, her mother and half a dozen other people in her family who survived the earthquake -- as eight others died -- to enter the United States. Still, she flew to Haiti late Saturday, hoping that somehow she could find a way to bring them back. Now that the earthquake's initial shock is giving way to the realities of trying to cope in the ruins, a growing number of Haitians -- and their relatives in the United States -- are starting to chafe under the Obama administration's edict to resist, as Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has put it, "an impulse to leave the island and to come here." The tension between U.S. policy and the desperation to leave is spawning a debate in Washington over whether the government should let more Haitians in. Immigration advocates and several members of Congress have begun pressing the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to ease the rules. So far, the focus is on two groups: Haitians with relatives legally in the United States and a few hundred injured children who, in the judgment of doctors doing relief work in Haiti, could die without sophisticated medical care. In the first days after the Jan. 12 quake, Napolitano announced that the government would admit Haitian children already on the cusp of adoption and that it would allow Haitians who were in the United States illegally to stay for 18 months. The administration has not eased restrictions for children newly orphaned or injured by the disaster, Haitians who had already been seeking U.S. visas, or any other earthquake victims who want to come. Late last week, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said Homeland Security officials had told him the agency would grant "humanitarian parole" to about 200 severely injured Haitian children. Even after that, Nelson said, he got a late-night e-mail, with the subject line "HELP," from a Miami neurosurgeon doing relief work, saying the U.S. Embassy in Haiti would not allow three critically burned children to be flown to a Miami burn unit. Nelson also said the State Department had issued a memo saying that a 17-year-old named Samantha, with a broken back and a father in Michigan, "would be ineligible to board an aircraft to the United States." "Typical bureaucratic crap that needs to be cut through," Nelson said in an interview. While Nelson wants to admit only critically injured children for treatment, a groundswell is building in favor of letting certain Haitians emigrate. Advocates' immediate focus is Haitians who, before the disaster, had applied -- and in some cases been approved -- for a kind of visa available to foreign relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents. About 19,000 Haitians have pending applications for such visas, according to DHS. Nearly 55,000 Haitians have been approved for family visas but are on waiting lists to enter because Congress has set limits on how many may come each year, the State Department says. Given the quotas, "it can take years and years for families to be reunited," said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. A spokesman for Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency would "put at the head of the line" applicants for relative visas from Haiti. But he and a State Department spokeswoman acknowledged that quicker visa approvals would not mean those Haitians could enter the United States more quickly unless Congress alters the quotas -- something lawmakers are not discussing. Lavinia Limon, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said that letting Haitians join U.S. relatives would relieve at least some of the humanitarian burden in Port-au-Prince. The United States, she said, has airlifted foreigners out of other emergencies, such as Albanians from Kosovo and refugees from the Vietnam War. Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors tighter controls on immigration, countered that "poverty and underdevelopment can't be criteria we use to pick immigrants. There are too many of them." And he said that Haitian earthquake victims could consume U.S. social services and displace American workers -- without generating enough income to send back to Haiti "to make a difference" there. Still, Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that if the United States doubled for the next five years the 25,000 Haitians who have been coming to the United States annually, it would substantially increase the remittances sent back, providing critical help as the nation tries to rebuild. Such help streaming home to families is more reliable and more likely to be spent efficiently than the ebb and flow of foreign aid, he said. Abrams suggested that to satisfy critics of increased immigration, the United States could offset the influx of Haitians by temporarily slowing immigration from elsewhere. Among Haitians and their U.S. relatives, Limon predicted, pressure on U.S. immigration policy will escalate in the coming weeks and months. "You need a boat, a captain, money. Nobody has that," she said. "But in two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, they will." In Little Haiti, the first stirrings are already visible. "How can anyone watch someone who has . . . no food, and they're just lying in the street covering themselves with a box, and then say, 'No more immigration'? How is that humane?" said Tchelsie Lafond, 20, whose uncle crawled out of the rubble of the bank in which he worked and, with his wife, now wants to come to the United States. Meanwhile, Celestin, a 49-year-old restaurant worker and U.S. citizen, was so frustrated listening to her brother plead for her to help family members reach Miami that she accepted a one-way plane ticket from her church and flew to Haiti with a small delegation of parishioners Saturday night. She has no idea how she will afford to get home. Still, Celestin said, she hopes to find her way to the U.S. Embassy in the shattered capital and beg someone to let her relatives go back with her. "In Haiti, they have nothing at all," she said. "In the U.S., people can help them out."
Poster Comment: a. Should natural disasters affect US immigration policy? b. Should Elliott Abrams keep his anti-America yap shut? "...Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush who is now at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that if the United States doubled for the next five years the 25,000 Haitians who have been coming to the United States annually, it would substantially increase the remittances sent back, providing critical help as the nation tries to rebuild. Such help streaming home to families is more reliable and more likely to be spent efficiently than the ebb and flow of foreign aid, he said. Abrams suggested that to satisfy critics of increased immigration, the United States could offset the influx of Haitians by temporarily slowing immigration from elsewhere..."
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#1. To: scrapper2 (#0)
Let them go to other island nations, Venezuela, or anywhere other than here. Why would they want to come to a nation that they hate so much?
Years ago they had 7 million people in Haiti and one million Haitians in the US. Now there are now 9 million in Haiti and who know how many in the US.
The Truth of 911 Shall Set You Free From The Lie
Why would they want to come to a nation that they hate so much? Yeah, what you said. But I seriously doubt Venezuela would take them. Chavez might talk that $#it but I seriously doubt it would happen.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. Mo' money.
It's not socialism if it's the white man's money.
More importantly, why should our immigration quotas be changed overnight just because one particular nation has suffered a disaster, especially when our own nation is in an economic depression, still reeling from the humongous financial disaster that occurred in September 2008? And how many disasters have occurred around the world over the years [both natural and man made]? Answer: lots. Why are Haitians more deserving than other nationals of jumping the immigration queue and also having its immigration quotas increased? These demands from Haiti advocates are baseless. US citizens, Katrina victims, lived in mobile trailers in Louisiana or in cruise ship tiny rooms for a long time while waiting for their city and homes to be rebuilt. Imo, Haitian earthquake victims can stay in their nation and live in similar temporary accommodations that Katrina victims made do with. These temporary lodging alternatives would probably be a lot better than the slums that Haitians called "home" frankly. The bottom line is that Haitians are not more special than other nationals who have suffered calamities.
Who is going to take in Americans when this country is just like Hatti?
God is always good!
There are several dozen nations more qualified and that present better cultural assimilation for the haitians than the duhnited states of duhmeriKa...
LOL Grim Reaper is all that awaits. LIVE FREE or DIE Americans...
Well said, and Amen. How is it that our .gov is both the worlds policeman and its nanny? We cannot even provide for our own here, much less the rest of the world.
#2. To: scrapper2 (#0)
#3. To: Lod (#1)
Let them go to other island nations, Venezuela, or anywhere other than here.
Lord Acton
#4. To: Lod (#1)
Why would they want to come to a nation that they hate so much?
#5. To: Lod, Horse, Jame Deffenbach, Prefrontal Vortex, Ferret Mike (#1)
Why would they want to come to a nation that they hate so much?
#6. To: scrapper2 (#0)
Abrams suggested that to satisfy critics of increased immigration, the United States could offset the influx of Haitians by temporarily slowing immigration from elsewhere..."
#7. To: scrapper2 (#0)
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”—Samuel Adams 
#8. To: RickyJ (#6)
Who is going to take in Americans when this country is just like Hatti?
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”—Samuel Adams
#9. To: scrapper2. all (#5)
These demands from Haiti advocates are baseless. US citizens, Katrina victims, lived in mobile trailers in Louisiana or in cruise ship tiny rooms for a long time while waiting for their city and homes to be rebuilt. Imo, Haitian earthquake victims can stay in their nation and live in similar temporary accommodations that Katrina victims made do with. These temporary lodging alternatives would probably be a lot better than the slums that Haitians called "home" frankly. The bottom line is that Haitians are not more special than other nationals who have suffered calamities.
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