The
Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) decision last
week to resume
deportations of noncriminal Haitians, disingenuously
citing improved conditions despite political and
economic turmoil and an unchecked cholera epidemic, is
inhumane, ill-advised, and shocking to the
Haitian-American community. It may rip families apart
and curtail life-saving remittances to Haiti.
DHS should
immediately reverse it.
It evokes another
administration failure that any presidential candidate
seeking Haitian-American votes should address. That is
DHS’ failure to significantly expand the Haitian Family
Reunification Program (HFRP), announced in October 2014
as a way to promote orderly outflow and to help Haiti
recover by generating additional remittances.
We fought nearly
five years for its creation. What was created was so
arbitrarily limited that as of Jun. 30, only 1,952 HFRP
beneficiaries had been approved, mocking administration
goals and promises. In contrast, more than 100,000 have
arrived under DHS’s excellent and recently reinstated
Cuban Family Reunification Program.
Haiti’s devastating
2010 earthquake led to bipartisan calls to create the
HFRP to more quickly bring in beneficiaries on wait
lists of up to 13 years whom DHS already had approved.
We said that it would decrease desperation, save lives,
expeditiously reunite families and speed recovery in
Haiti at little or no cost to the U.S. taxpayer by
generating a significant additional flow of remittances
back home.
But eligibility was
arbitrarily and inexplicably limited to petitioners
whose beneficiaries were within two years of getting
their visas anyway. Of about 100,000 on the approved
wait list, DHS thought it would interview 5,000 persons
per year; but as of Jun. 30, 2016, although
beneficiaries three years out are now eligible, fewer
than 2,000 had been approved.
This is senseless.
Thousands of approved beneficiaries further back on the
wait list could be working and sending desperately
needed remittances back home. That was the goal in
creating the program. Why can the United States properly
and generously bring in more than 100,000 Cubans but
only a handful of black Haitians?
The eligibility
restriction is also a financial “double whammy”: In
addition to HFRP’s significant application fees and
related costs, each beneficiary also has to pay a hefty
$1,070 fee to “adjust their status” to legal permanent
residence once their visa becomes available, i.e. within
three years or less. This has made HFRP prohibitively
expensive for many.
But if a
beneficiary six years out on the wait list, for example,
were eligible under HFRP, he or she could be earning and
saving and would be much more able to afford the $1,070
adjustment fee in the sixth year. (Cubans avoid paying
the adjustment fee altogether under the Cuban Adjustment
Act of 1966, a significant advantage.)
The Obama
administration has failed the Haitian community in at
least two important ways. DHS’ recent resumption of
Haiti removals, claiming improved conditions, is wrong
and tone-deaf. And its much-heralded Haitian Family
Reunification Program needs to be expanded to include
every DHS-approved beneficiary on the wait list.
Any presidential
candidate who wants the votes of Haitian Americans in
November should promise to immediately reinstate the
halt of deportations to Haiti and to broadly expand the
Haitian Family Reunification Program, now a mere shadow
of its Cuban namesake. Fairness, the community’s trust
and Haitian lives and families are at stake.
Marleine Bastien is executive director of Haitian Women
of Miami. Steven Forester is immigration policy
coordinator for the Institute for Justice & Democracy in
Haiti. This op-ed was first published in the Miami
Herald.
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