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    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
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    Wet-foot, dry-foot stays despite U.S., Cuba normalizing relations

    Wet-foot, dry-foot stays despite U.S., Cuba normalizing relations

    BY DAVID GOODHUE
    dgoodhue@keynoter.com December 20, 2014

    Even though the United States is on the path to normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, the controversial wet-foot, dry-foot immigration policy stands.


    "We're still out there patrolling and enforcing immigration laws," said U.S. Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Ryan Doss, a Sector 7 Miami spokesman. "Nothing on our side has changed."


    The Coast Guard released an official statement Thursday regarding the U.S.'s new stance toward Cuba:


    "Coast Guard missions and operations in the Southeast remain unchanged. The Coast Guard strongly discourages attempts to illegally enter the country by taking to the sea.

    These trips are extremely dangerous. Individuals located at sea may be returned to Cuba."


    This has critics of the Obama administration's Wednesday announcement that the White House reopened diplomatic relations with Cuba for the first time in five decades asking why Cuban migrants would still receive preferential treatment.


    "The Cuban Adjustment Act is based on the premise that people are fleeing tyranny and oppression," Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said at a press conference in Miami Thursday. "And now the United States government has said that we no longer consider Cuba to be repressive and a dictatorship. They just recognized them as a legitimate form of government."


    Under wet-foot, dry foot, which was added to the Cuban Adjustment Act in 1995, any Cuban migrant who steps foot on U.S. soil can stay in the country. If that person is stopped at sea, he or she is repatriated back to Cuba. Immigrants from almost any other country must go through a long series of bureaucratic steps to legally stay in the U.S.


    Keith Smith, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman, said his agency has not received any word that the United States' stance on Cuban migrants will change any time soon. However, he referred any specific question on the matter to the Obama administration.


    Obama's decision comes at a time when the number of people caught at sea trying to escape communist Cuba is the highest its been in nearly six years. For the fiscal year 2014, which ended in October, the Coast Guard interdicted 2,059 Cubans at sea. This is up from 1,357 in 2013, and way up from the 423 rafters caught in 2010, according to Coast Guard stats.


    Doss said patrols are still picking up Cuban migrants in higher-than-usual rates.


    "The numbers are still up," he said. "We're still at that six-year high."


    For those who came here from Cuba and have become citizens as a direct result of wet-foot, dry foot, Obama's decision this week is bittersweet.


    Karel Suarez of Miami came to the United States eight years ago. The 27-year-old year law school student flew to Mexico and from there, walked across the U.S. border.


    "They gave me my papers and said welcome to the United States," Suarez said in an interview Friday.


    Within a year, he had his green card; within five years, he was a citizen.


    "I'm in my second year of law school, and I would not be able to be here if the law was not in place," Suarez said. "But I think Obama's decision is for the greater good. If we want everybody in Cuba to be free, it does not make sense anymore."


    He added that there is more of a chance for the Cuban government to make reforms benefitting the citizenship if Congress agrees with Obama's call to lift the decades-old trade embargo.


    "A lot of people left not because they wanted to leave Cuba. If there is freedom and economic reform, maybe fewer people will leave," Suarez said. "At the same time, they wouldn't have to suffer through the same things we had to go through, like coming to a new country and not speaking the language."

    http://www.keysnet.com/2014/12/20/50...ml?sp=/99/106/
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    MW
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    Karel Suarez of Miami came to the United States eight years ago. The 27-year-old year law school student flew to Mexico and from there, walked across the U.S. border.

    "They gave me my papers and said welcome to the United States," Suarez said in an interview Friday.


    Within a year, he had his green card; within five years, he was a citizen.
    Absolutely ludicrous!

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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