The secret behind the Haitians who have turned up in Del Rio, Texas is that they didn't migrate from Haiti at all but from Chile, where they had been granted asylum and were working and living comfortably as refugees.
The dozens of Chilean identity cards that litter the ground in Ciudad Acuna, just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, all bear distinctly non- Hispanic names.
There is Prosper Pierre for instance, or Linode Lafleur or Eddyson Jean- Charles. None of the cards carries a name such as Gonzalez or Muñoz or Rojas.
A closer look shows three telling letters - HTI - on the cards where they ask for the bearer's nationality.
These are the discarded ID cards of Haitians who have turned up in Del Rio by the thousands.
But they haven't come from Port-au-Prince or Cap-Haïtien or any other city in the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. These have mainly come from Santiago, the glittering capital of relatively prosperous Chile. Many had jobs there.
'As one put it to me, "I love Chile, it's 1,000 times better than Haiti," migration expert Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies told DailyMail.com.
'But I want to come to the United States, that's a million times better.'
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