CARIBBEAN BOAT PEOPLE: CLINTON’S FIRST CRISIS? (NPG Footnote)

• Daniel James
• December 1, 1992
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
• 0 Comments

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CARIBBEAN BOAT PEOPLE: CLINTON’S FIRST CRISIS?
An NPG Forum Paper
(NPG Footnote) 
by Daniel James
December 1992

By the time he is inaugurated on Jan. 20, President-elect Bill Clinton may be faced with a record flood of both Haitian and Cuban boat people. Besides, immigration from the Dominican Republic — our biggest Caribbean immigrant-sending country — and Jamaica is even greater, though underpublicized. The convergence of these trends could produce a major crisis.

Clinton’s election, reports the New York Times (Nov. 23), made Haitians “giddy” with the expectation that he will either restore democracy to their unhappy country or welcome them into the U.S. “with open arms.” Hundreds of boats are now being readied to sail the nearly 500 miles of choppy Caribbean waters to Miami, Coast Guard aerial surveillance reveals. Some are being built with wood ripped from their ramshackle homes.

A parallel rush of boat people is expected from that other oppressed Caribbean island, Cuba. They have continued crowding into Florida since the 1980 Mariel boatlift when 125,000 of them arrived. They are not necessarily reacting to Clinton’s election. Quite simply, as one Cuban refugee explained:

“There is nothing in Cuba. Everyone wants to leave.”

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