 Wet Foot, Dry Foot, Dusty Foot: A Dr. Seussian Policy! Masoud Shafaee – Washington
Prism
With newly released immigration statistics showing that
more Cubans entered the United States legally last year than any other year
since 1994, a renewed sense of urgency has emerged regarding the United States’
unique immigration policy towards Cuba. The policy—which has been in place since
the 1995 revision to the Cuban Adjustment Act—essentially allows Cubans to
legally remain in the U.S. if they make it to shore. As a result, it is the envy
of would-be emigrants from all parts of the world, and Latin America in
particular.
Cuba has been on the American conscious since it was a
Spanish colony, and what American textbooks refer to as the “Spanish-American
War” Cubans tellingly know by another name: “The U.S. intervention in Cuba's War
of Independence.” Located just ninety miles south of Key West in Florida, the
island remained a strategic interest to the U.S throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries until the American economic presence reached its peak under
the regime of General Fulgencio Batista, who had taken power by staging a coup
d’état. By 1959, Fidel Castro’s rebel forces overthrew the government and the
soon-to-be socialist state aligned itself with the Soviet Union. Soon
thereafter, diplomatic relations were cut and President Kenney imposed a trade
and travel embargo on Cuba which stands till this day.
The politically charged rapport between the two countries
inevitably led to a peculiar immigration dynamic that still exists. As Lisandro
Perez, Director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International
University points out, Cuba is an exception with respect to U.S. immigration
policies. “It’s the only country on earth that we have a migration agreement
with, and that’s very ironic.”
In the late 1950’s, the United States annually granted
parole to approximately 17,000 refugees fleeing from communist and Middle
Eastern countries. Beyond this limited Congressional program, the U.S. Attorney
General was entitled to an uncapped parole authority of his own.
Those fortunate enough to be selected under these
provisions were nevertheless left in a state of legal flux as they were given
only parole and not a visa. This essentially conferred a temporary status while
requiring them to leave the country when the humanitarian conditions
necessitating their parole ceased to exist. Fifty years later, this has not
happened. This ultimately led to the 1966 Refugee Adjustment Act which provided
permanent residence for parolees who had entered the United States past 1959 and
had stayed for over a year.
Doris Meissner, former Commissioner of the INS under
President Clinton and Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, believes
that this statute was merely a “catch-up” remedy for immigration officials. “It
was an implicit recognition that more people were going to come, and that there
was a need for a solution,” she contends.
That solution presented itself in 1980 Refugee Act. Among
other things, the Refugee Act rescinded the Adjustment Act, effectively ending
the policy of providing green cards for all affected parolees.
For all but Cuban parolees, that is.
Ms. Meissner brands this as a “schizophrenic” policy. “We wouldn’t put Cubans through the asylum process, it would take us over a year to process them, and by the time that time came, one year had elapsed and they were free to stay here through the Refugee Act.” From the research that she has done for the Migration Policy Institute, Ms. Meissner believes that this loophole came from a concerted lobbying effort from the powerful Cuban-American lobby based in Washington and Miami. This in turn led to accusations from the Cuban government that the U.S. was giving Cubans an impetus to come to the U.S. All of this culminated in the 1994 accord signed between
Cuba and the United States. In return for a pledge from Havana to “take
effective measures in every way it possibly can to prevent unsafe departures,”
the United States agreed to limit the number of Cubans entering the United
States to 20,000 per year.
But with 45,000 documented Cubans having legally entered
the United States in 2006 alone, obviously other avenues to entering the country
still exist. Dr. Perez delineates between two ways to enter the U.S. The first
is attaining the aforementioned visa through the U.S. interest section in
Havana. The second is what has come to be known as the ‘wet-foot’ / ‘dry-foot’
policy that came out of a 1995 revision to the Cuban Adjustment Act.
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