What do Haitians need most? To get away from Haiti Chris Berg The Sydney Morning Herald January 24 2010
...if the developed world really wants to help Haiti, we could let as many Haitians as humanly possible work in the West. We could dramatically expand our guest worker and migration programs.
In a strange coincidence, Berg advances the same ?©migr?©-remittances-as-aid argument as Abrams. Although Australian, his destination of choice seems to be the USA.
even a modest expansion of guest worker programs in the US and other developed nations will have a greater long-term effect than any amount of money… charity… can raise.
Tell Chris Berg American (and hopefully Australian) immigration policy should not be run as 3rd World welfare.
Meantime, over at The Huffington Post the problem of how to use the earthquake to accommodate Obama’s Haitian import lust is being approached on another path.
Cut the Red Tape: Why Haitians Need Humanitarian Parole Now Jeffrey Kahn and Aaron Zelinsky January 23, 2010
suggests that importing the Haitian injured should be the stratagem.
The Department of Homeland Security should send a special team of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service officers to Haiti to grant humanitarian parole to those in need of urgent medical treatment in the United States…DHS should use the humanitarian parole framework and open the door to life-saving treatment for seriously wounded earthquake survivors.
No thought of course is given to the fact that this would involve huge transfers of scarce medical resources away from Americans who have paid for them through insurance and tax deductions.
Berg, Kahn, Zelinsky… Guess you can’t entirely blame men of obviously Haitian heritage putting their people first.
But they do not have to be obeyed.
Interesting factoid from one of the numerous efforts by officials to allay citizen fears of Haitian inundation:
U.S.: No Haitian mass exodus to Florida seen or expected By Mike M. Ahlers and Kim Segal, CNN.com January 20, 2010
An estimated 25,000 Haitians were among the mass migration of more than 150,000 asylum seekers, primarily Cubans, during the Mariel boatlift in 1980
In this event, Castro exploited leniency towards Cuban illegal immigration by the Carter administration to dump undesirables on America. Clearly, Castro thought the same of his Haitian immigrants then as the Dominicans now.
