TheAgitator.com
The Best Way To Help Haiti
Sunday, January 24th, 2010Let Haitians come here. Here’s Michael A. Clemens in the Washington Post:
After the earthquake, the Obama administration quickly suspended the deportation of Haitians already residing illegally in the United States (a population estimated at 100,000 to 200,000) for 18 months. That’s a wise and welcome step, but an insufficient one. The United States has deported only around 1,000 Haitians per year recently, so a brief halt will make a limited difference in who lives where. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized Thursday that the new policy will not apply to Haitians seeking to come here now. “Our ordinary and regular immigration laws will apply going forward, which means that we are not going to be accepting into the United States Haitians who are attempting to make it to our shores. They will be interdicted. They will be repatriated.”
Yet Haitians willing to emigrate today would typically experience vast and immediate increases in their standard of living and security — a goal the administration no doubt supports. That is why so many have been willing to leave Haiti, braving ocean blockades and other risks, even before the quake. Between 1982 and 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard stopped 114,716 Haitians on their way to the United States, forcing them to go back, and such unsuccessful attempts must certainly have deterred an even larger number from even trying to leave. Last March, 51 percent of Haitians polled told Gallup that, given the opportunity, they would leave their country permanently…
Haiti already gets close to $2 billion per year — about a third of its income — in cash remittances from its citizens living abroad. That’s nearly 100 times as much as generous Americans have donated to Haiti via their cellphones. And unlike foreign aid, remittances go directly to families.
The earthquake in Haiti has laid bare the consequences of our restrictive immigration policies, particularly their effects on desperately poor people overseas. Countless Americans have been moved by the images and stories from Haiti, and have showed their solidarity and generosity with their wallets. A golden door visa to America, whether temporary or permanent, would have a larger and ultimately more lasting impact on the lives of the world’s poorest, in Haiti and beyond.
You need to add this to the headline.
“and hurt America.”
Third World savages bring nothing to America.
Hell, send them to France, it is their mess anyway.
I’ve been saying this to family and freinds , and whoever will listen , it’s a waste of resources to transport all the water & supplies to an island that has no electricity , running water , or infrastructure .
I agree that it would be more efficient / effective to bring the people to where the infrastructure is already in place , at the very least they could bring the young & old & wounded , that would reduce the population to the healthy adults , making the situation there much more manageable .
“”Third World savages bring nothing to America.”"
any more nuggets of wisdom mr. Duke ?
Suggest poor people come to America and you’ll see liberals turn into conservatives quickly.
Who said anything about savages? Yet-another problem with nationalism and the whole concept of countries in general.
What a horrible human being you are.
White dudes taking responsibility for their actions? You have a better chance scoring with the tooth fairy.
It’s kind of an odd argument to make.
Of course almost anyone from any third world country would have ‘vast and immediate increases in their standard of living and security ‘ if they were to come here to the US.
It’s why where they live is considered third world, and its why the US is not considered third world.
#3 – There would be a bit of a logistics problem moving the population of port-au-prince to the US, more so than the problem of delivering supplies. I heard on npr that only 150 flights a day can get in there.
As the victims of katrina can testify, there is no place in the US set up to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees, and no way to get them here.
Radley,
If being against Chris Mallory calling Haitians third world savages makes me a horrible person, so be it. The whole “socialism is great, but only within our borders for our people” makes me sick and it doesn’t stand up morally. Earthquakes, disease, and hunger don’t care about borders–only people do and it costs lives.
Boyd, I’m pretty sure Radley’s comment was directed at Mallory. It did, after all, come only 2 minutes after your post.
About three days after the quake, I recall thinking, “wouldn’t it be something if Obama and his advisors came up with a plan to import Haitians to Florida … to further thier political interests and perhaps turn a swing state into a blue state.”
IMO, if there was EVER a reason to nation-build, it would be this time. This would be an excellent way to promote western values and demonstrate our ability to do good things.
I would argue that the US should put Haiti under a guardianship of sorts.
I’m wondering if Radley would be for returning them once we got their country back up and running?
One of the key problems with Haiti is that foreign aid has distorted the economy so much that to much of the population is dependent upon it. Over the last 30 years, aid has focused on emergency provisions or food, on building manufacturing, and is very centralized around Port Au Prince. i.e. the central planning mindset at work.
As a result we see (a) people leaving agriculture to migrate to Port Au Prince (PAP), leading to more hunger (b) collapse of the economy and inability to deliver aid when PAP is hit by a disaster even though it is build on a fault line and suffers hurricanes and massive mudslides, and has huge slums.
Far better than rent seeking would have been to promote economic activity, agriculture, education and the rule of law, and fight corruption, and then allow the people to grow their economy. We don’t do it because (a) agriculture suffers from our agricultural subsidies and (b) everything else requires long term commitments that don’t show up on CNN very well.
Perhaps you’re not hanging out with real liberals. I’m a big fat liberal and I think this is a great idea.
Honestly, where did you get the idea that liberals would oppose letting a bunch of poor people immigrate to America on humanitarian grounds? That’s really our sort of thing.
Many libertarians are just republicans who like to smoke pot. They’re easy to spot because of their reflexive contempt for liberals. They find it unbearable to agree with liberals, even on the issues where it’d be natural to make common cause with them.
Anybody who wants to come should be able to come. If my community was decimated, I would go stay with my relatives. I’m sure many of those people have relatives they could stay with in Miami and New York. It’s disgusting that we were preparing Krome detention center to imprison anyone who tried to come here.
If they are disease free, will receive minimum social services, and are willing to learn the language quickly and assimilate, then I’m all in.
But, for the record, Haiti is not our problem, anymore than any other random mess of a nation is our problem. Just as I don’t like reckless military intervention, I’m not crazy about reckless humanitarian intervention either.
#8 ever heard of these things called ships ?
#9 | Boyd Durkin ~ I’m pretty sure Radley was referring to Mallory
#13 | anne
most hatians already speak english and the few hatians I’ve personaly had contact with , are as hard working as a mexican IMO
Bringing them here does nothing to improve Haiti. Sending assistance and trying to clean up the governments corruption there would be a start. But if you import the population to the US you don’t leave much incentive for them to clean it up. Why try to clean up and rebuild if you can hope on a boat/plane and come to the US with no downside?
#14 Yes ships could be used to transport but the number of people makes this impractical. You are talking about 400k or more people. You also have the issue of where to place them once they get here. Provide for their basic needs, food, water, shelter, health care, etc until they can stand on their own.
#14 – The ports are messed up too, only boats with a shallow draft can make it, no relief boats can get in by the harbor..
“The White House says a U.S. Coast Guard ship has arrived in the harbor of Haiti’s capital — a harbor that hasn’t been able to handle incoming earthquake relief because it was damaged in Tuesday’s quake. Crew members will be using heavy cranes and other equipment to make the port functional.”
This sounds like a pretty horrible idea. 10% unemployment. The wages in my profession, IT, are being driven down. You cannot get a job where I work unless you are from Mexico or India working under an H1B visa and I am NOT exagerating. To suggest what we need is more immigration at this point is insanity. I know the Haitians will be unskilled workers but we have high unemployment at all levels. And we are becoming separate cultures. People are not mixing, what I see every day is separate groups of people keeping to themselves, not assimilating. We need to shut down immigration for an indefinite period until the people here can be assimilated.
Calling someone a horrible human being isn’t an argument, though. That we could help Haitians by bringing them here (or allowing them to come here) is plain. Whether this would actually be a net gain for us is less clear and you can certainly make a strong case that it would be a net loss in the near term; these are not skilled workers for the most part and you would obviously be getting a lot of needy people who would require the assistance of our social safety net (such as it is). Thus if you believe that the US government exists to protect the interests of its citizens (and not the interests of humanity in general) it’s pretty easy to argue against letting them in. More generally, why do you think you could import a big chunk of the Haitian population and not get some of Haiti with it? Is the (atrocious) government there something that sprang from the land, or is it an outgrowth of the culture and character of the people?
Yes, but saying “third world savages bring nothing to America” is reeaaaallly not an argument. Not one fit for the century, anyway.
Let’s take yet another look at this. A casual glance at the comment thread suggests:
those in favor: Kino, Boyd Durkin, kt, BroadSnark, anne, Laertes
those opposed: Chris Mallory, arglebargle, Waste93, Elroy
And let’s head off some arguments by very broadly defining “those in favor” as “those inclined to think that it’s a good idea, or at least more good than bad” and “those opposed” as the reverse.
Now, of those, how many (apart from me) would self-identify as more liberal than conservative? And I ask this fully expecting that several will decline to self-identify as EITHER to any extent, and that’s a perfectly reasonable answer, especially here on a Libertarian blog.
-Laertes-
I would identify as a conservative in that the US needs to look out for the interests of its citizens.
Libertarian in the sense that I don’t care about abortion, think the drug war is silly and feel if two men want to marry each other they have a right to be as miserable as anyone else.
Immigration is the perfect way to weed out the yokeltarians from the rest. It’s where the line is drawn on natural rights. It’s where free markets fail. Where the collective becomes more valuable than the individual. They’re all for freedom, except when people actually start exercising freedom.
Shecky, your argument seems to overlook the fact that mass immigration into America can have a negative impact on my personal (economic) freedom.
thorn, your argument suggests that the government is supposed to protect you from competition or prevent businesses from closing if those things might have a negative impact on your economic freedom.
Actually, your argument suggests that competition is some kind of impediment to economic freedom, and should be controlled by the government. But, in fact, competition is simply an important (though often harsh) part of economic freedom. And I’d say that the more government interferes with competition, the less economic freedom exists for everyone.
-Les-
You want me to compete sure, let me live in a house with a couple other families like my competitors do. Bring in a bus load of people from India put them in cheap apartments with mattresses on the floor and tell me I’ve got to compete with raising my family of 4 in the supposed middle class. On top of that make it so expensive to hire me through taxes and expensive medical care and regulations that any company in their right mind would go over seas and then tell me to compete. They told us we were no longer going to be a manufacturing based economy, the future was tech jobs and they were right just not about who would be doing them.
thorn:
Your post ignores the fact that mass immigration into America over the last few centuries has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the freedoms and prosperity of the people who live there.
The idea that competition is some grave danger to the collective is perplexing to me. Especially coming from a site presumably oriented to libertarian sympathetic folks. If fear of competition is reasonable grounds for restricting international immigration, it seems also reasonable grounds to restrict immigration between states or cities, or regions. After all, competitors from the Rust Belt, or Las Vegas, or New Orleans are just as much a threat as those from Haiti, no? (but… but… Americans have rights…)
And if you can justify restricting human movement because of perceived threat to your prosperity, you can certainly justify restricting movement of goods over the borders. Certainly China or India can make widgets cheaper than you can. Thus, imported goods should be restricted, too, because their competitive edge imperils your prosperity.
The path from libertarian to yokel takes just a tiny step. But we know well where it goes and how quickly it gets there.
Elroy, if you don’t want to live in a house with a couple of other families the way your competitors do (and I sure wouldn’t), then you have a choice. You can either make the same sacrifices your competitors make, or you can change your career. Or you can make yourself indispensable at a specialized job that not anyone can do (the foreigners who come here and live on top of each other are generally laborers and not, for instance, programmers). Or you can insist that the government protects you from people who don’t need as many square feet or as much disposable income as you do.
That the government makes it more expensive for companies to manufacture here is a shame. But the fact that companies move overseas also makes it possible for us to afford many of the things we take for granted. And the average “displaced” worker usually makes a parallel or upward move in their next job.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy, I know. Losing your job sucks. But I don’t think anyone is entitled to a life that’s easy or lifetime employment, especially via the inevitably unjust and incompetent actions of the government. People are entitled to make the best of their lives and there’s no reason that the government should prevent some people from honestly competing with others.
Doug Stanhope makes a really good point (rather harshly) here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxpf_bayjbQ&feature=related
The problem I have is that it wouldn’t really help Haiti. It would still be a mess. You could let 100,000 of them come to the USA every year and it would make no difference in Haiti There would be more people suffering in Haiti at the end of ten years of that than when we started. The age demographics might change a little and life would be better for those that came here, but the same problem would still exist. Since it does not fix the problem, it is not a real solution.
The only way to fix it in the long run is to stop the aid. Then maybe farmers could make some money and get the economy going. Don’t get me wrong here, I am all for earthquake aid, just not the stuff on a regular basis because I think it hurts more than it helps.
Laertes, I’m an anarchist, but once upon a time I thought I was a liberal. I would say I probably agree with liberals more often than conservatives, but that is largely because conservatives in the US have been hijacked by religion.
Much of the mess in Haiti has a lot to do with our meddling – sometimes perhaps with good intentions, usually not. It would help to stop dumping subsidized rice on their farmers, sending in the marines, and flying out their elected president.
And clearly most of you have never spent any time around Haitian people, or all these negative comments would not be possible.
Bull. I’m not anti-immigration, but this is crap. Any one of hundreds of laws were enacted as left-handed ways to discriminate. Marijuana, anyone?
Shecky,
Do you have any evidence that mass immigration has improved the lot of the countries they are immigrating from? We’ve had mass immigration from Mexico and I don’t see a whole lot of improvement caused from the migration itself. By exporting their people it has allowed the government to not have to spend on infrastructure and social programs nearly as much as they would have. The easy outlet for workers has also allowed those dissatisfied with the economic conditions there to move out and not required the government to make changes they would likely have had to make. The easy flow of people across borders means that those that could fight to change corruption and such in their countries can easily leave and little changes in the home country.
If we bar Haitians from entering the US to pick up the threads of their lives, we will be no better than the USG when it prevented a ship full of German Jews from docking in Florida and, instead, sent them back to certain death in Nazi Germany.
We are a nation of immigrants. If we welcome the Haitians, we honor our committment to open borders and giving all our citizens a fair chance at a good life. I’m ready to”lift a lamp beside the golden door.” Who’s with me?
I’m a fiscal conservative.
I want my money spent on helping US citizens first. I guess that makes me almost like a nazi?
Haiti is just one of many, many shitholes on this planet. We can’t fix it, and letting all the citizens of each of those shitholes move here wont fix it either.
We don’t have enough money to take care of our own people. There are STILL katrina refugees. New Orleans is still not rebuilt.
How about we prove our ability to help own people before we decide to fix the world.
This idea, Radley, makes about as much sense for this country as the equally idiotic idea of building democracy in places such as, say, Iraq. It’s an idea G.W.B. could really like.
We’re seeing about what I expected: Liberals for, conservatives against.
This isn’t surprising, but I wanted to double-check my assumptions in light of the startling suggestion that this idea of bringing lots of Haitians to live in America would repel liberals. Always pays to double-check. The crowd here at this blog has surprised me before.
I’d have been very surprised to see this turn out any other way, though. Everyone wants to “look after their own.” A core struggle between liberalism and conservatism is the constant liberal push to define “our own” ever more broadly, and the conservative resistance to that constant prodding.
Here, for instance, is Fred Clark on that point:
http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2005/09/theres_always_r.html
On the infamous mayor Ronnie Harris of Gretna, “whose police forced evacuees from New Orleans back into their flooded city at gunpoint,” Clark quotes blogger Rob Loftis:
“I can see quite clearly where [Mayor Harris] is coming from: He thinks he did the right thing, because he protected his people. His problem is that he has too small a view of who his people are.”
Liberals are generally inclined to think of the Other as one of their own. Conservatives are generally inclined not to. Neither heuristic is going to yield always-perfect results, but understanding them makes it real easy to predict who will and won’t like this Haiti idea.
Haiti uses 1/3 of a 30,000 sq mile island.
Go east to the Dominican Republic, seems they did not even feel this tremor. Or maybe they are just not holding their hand out like some in NO did a while back. The rest of the gulf coast picked up and got back to life.
One thing for sure, this is a big time money maker for many, I remain skeptical about where it may end up.
It is a sad situation but they need help, not relocation. They are also getting help, lots of it. They can’t fix it laying on the beach in Miami.
Though well intentioned and even slightly sympathetic at points, I find this suggestion to be politically idiotic and philosophically at odds with the most basic tenets of libertarianism. The reasons:
1. It is virtually a forgone conclusion that Haitian refugees to the U.S. will receive both public and private charitable support here. The cost of living here is also substantially higher than in Haiti, as is the level of income necessary to sustain a person above a minimum poverty threshold. Since this cost will be borne by the American public (both as donors and taxpayers), it makes more sense to invest it in Haiti where, dollar for dollar, it will reach more people.
2. It may sound insensitive to say it, but Haiti is a politically, economically, and culturally dysfunctional nation. Their 200 year history has seen more dictators, coups, and self-appointed “Presidents for Life” than practically any other country on the globe. It is a perennial candidate for last place on the world corruption index. And its entire political system is thoroughly infested with a widespread and popular adherence to voodoo-based supserstition (Papa Doc used to even dress the part to make himself resemble a voodoo deity known for top hats and black clothing, and the last 3 presidents of Haiti have openly consulted with a voodoo “spiritual leader” on policy – including what to do about the earthquake). One might be tempted to say that the Haitians have been “victims” of totalitarian regimes, and to an extent they are. But this overlooks the fact that the Haitian populace (in the form of mass uprisings and revolutions) has been a driving force behind the installation of these very same leaders since literally day one. It is no coincidence that the four main “founding fathers” of Haiti (L’ouverture, Henri-Christophe, Dessalines, and Petion), great “libertarians” that they were, all declared themselves autocratic dictators-for-life after they got into power. And the majority of Haitian leaders ever since have been no different. Even when nominal “democracy” comes to Haiti, it results in the election of a communist voodoo-practitioner fruitloop like Aristide (It’s their version of the same paradox we’re dealing with in the middle east – democracy sounds great and free and wonderful and inherently libertarian until the voters elect Hamas). Taking hundreds of thousands of people out of a 200-year ingrained political culture of superstition-based totalitarianism and plopping them into the modern United States and expecting it to all work out fine and dandy is pure insanity.
3. Disaster relief efforts involving the government have a long and notorious history of being rife with corruption and graft. Witness Katrina in our own borders, where FEMA debit cards went to pay for guns, drugs, porn, boob jobs, and just about everything but actual food and necessities. Take the entrenched corruption of the Haitian political culture, and that problem – which we can’t even control for ourselves – is increased a thousand fold.
4. The libertarian’s paradox with open immigration is NOT whether the immigrant population is economically productive to the country – that much is fairly clear. It is how that productivity is distributed vis-a-vis the associated costs it imposes, even if those costs are less in aggregate. Mass migrations tend to result in the new population concentrated around a few core geographic locations. The economic value of their productivity (lower costs, greater labor efficiency etc.) is realized nationwide as it diffuses across the market. But the social service costs associated with immigrants (which come NOT from the fact that they are immigrants, but the fact that the migration rapidly increases the population of a confined geographic area) are inherently concentrated (i.e. schools, roads and infrastructure, increased fire and policing, and – in our modern welfare state – localized social services). The costs of population growth therefore fall on the localized recipient of the new population, while the benefits are spread across the country at no noticeable strain on their public treasury outside of those localized regions. Dumping hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees in a place like Florida will strain that state’s budget and political system well beyond what any of the other states are willing to give.
5. It is inherent to the politics of emergency and crisis management that there will be some sort of publicly funded component to the response. On strictly libertarian grounds, those public funds come from taxes that are coercively collected from you, me, and everyone else. What right does the government have to tell me I must personally support a disaster relief in Haiti that it deems “worthy” for reasons that are entirely arbitrary and political? If I want to help the Haitians, that choice should be mine and mine alone to make. Encouraging their migration here at inevitable taxpayer expense violates my inherent right to make the choice of which charitable causes I should support.
Put me in the “keep ‘em in Haiti” camp.
Then leave them the fuck alone. Let them be FREE.
shecky,
You’re implying that my negative opinion of mass Haitian exodus to America has something to do with restricting their free right to travel, or some such thing. At the core of the issue, I frankly don’t care what country a person chooses to live in. If they wish to stay on that island, so be it. If they wish to move to Miami, so be it. But either way – don’t plan on me (willingly) financing their decision.
My problem with 400K people doing this at once is frankly – I don’t wish to pay for it. I don’t wish to pay for the extra social services they will require, demand, and likely be given through taxation upon my wages. As PW said – it’s not about telling someone “you can’t come here, because you aren’t American”. It’s about the budget and infrastructure that WILL be stretched to the limit to pay for such a thing.
They’ll need houses – who’s going to pay for 200K houses? The power, the water, the food, the clothing, the schools, the medical care, the transportation, etc – WHO is going to pay for that, when half of Haiti moves to Miami? The state? The city? The federal?
If those 400K people each walk across the border with $150K in their pocket, buy houses in the suburbs, start a few businesses and go on about their happy lives – fine, go for it. But if they show up and need half-a-million free meals, 3x a day, for the next 18 months – all the while needing free medical care (Which the current govt will no doubt try to provide) – then that is an infringement on MY personal freedom, to make money, acquire wealth without undo taxation, and create a better life for myself.
It’s one thing to ask for my contribution. It’s another to take it by force.
I have my answer.Big shock.