Thread: Wet foot Dry foot Policy

I was shocked that this was printed in the Miami Herald. The reason I am posting this is that smuggling humans is illegal and the Cubans making land are almost all being smuggled in on go fast boats. The days of the rafts and floating vehicles are long gone. In South Florida the people view smuggled Cubans as illegals even though the wet foot/dry foot policy allows them to stay.

http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/635724.html

Wet or dry, policy should be the same
Posted on Sun, Aug. 10, 2008reprint print email

BY MYRIAM MARQUEZ
mmarquez@MiamiHerald.com
F or decades we watched them arrive, wet, tired, dehydrated, some barely alive.

They sacrificed everything to take to the sea on rickety boats or rafts like the one my cousin built to get here in the 1990s. Desperate, they even grabbed inner tubes like another one of my cousins used to get to freedom in 1966.

Now it's all about those Cubans fortunate to have U.S. families who break the law and pay smugglers 10 thousand bucks a head to bring them here.

After this country extends them every privilege under the Cuban Adjustment Act, some of them abuse the law. They pop up in Medicare scams and, when the FBI comes after them, they take the next plane back to Cuba or hitch a ride on a smuggling boat headed to the communist island.

As Miami Herald reporter Jay Weaver's excellent Medicare Racket series exposed, at least half of South Florida's Medicare fugitives are believed to be back in Cuba. Most of those scammers arrived in the mid 1990s. Some became U.S. citizens, then set out to bilk U.S. taxpayers of millions of dollars in false Medicare bills.

We don't know if these fugitives arrived legally with a visa or in smuggling operations. But their lawbreaking puts the Cuban Adjustment Act in jeopardy.

FLIGHT RISKS

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno, who has handled several Medicare scam cases involving Cuban defendants, is right to warn his colleagues about the flight risks.

''It seems to me that our thinking has to change,'' Moreno noted during a June hearing when he learned that Carmen Gonzalez, charged in an $11 million scam, had left for Cuba. ``We always think here in Miami that if you're a Cuban refugee, you're not going to go back to Cuba.

``I'm wondering whether a Jew leaving Nazi Germany can go back and forth to visit the relatives. I would suspect you couldn't.''

It hurts to see this abuse of U.S. laws, particularly when there are good reasons to grant asylum to Cubans who are true political refugees.

With Fidel Castro dying and his brother Raúl cracking down on civil society groups, U.S. policy on Cuba is at a crossroads.

If we want to put pressure on the regime, then let's drop wet foot/dry foot. The 1995 immigration accord between the Clinton Administration and Cuba all but invited human smuggling.

EQUAL FOOTING

It's an arbitrary policy that's applied haphazardly. A Cuban can dry foot on low tide but would end up wet foot at high tide.

Those caught at sea get sent back to Cuba or, if they make a case for asylum, get sent to Guantánamo, forced to wait for months, sometimes years, for a third country to take them. But any Yosmany or Yusmila smuggled into the U.S. gets to stay without having to show cause.

It's an abuse of America's good will.

The adjustment act should apply to those who qualify under the 20,000 annual visa and family-unification system. Since November, U.S. immigration officials have been expediting parole visas in an attempt to stop the growing number of migrants at sea.

Sure, smuggling will continue -- whether from Cuba or Haiti or anywhere people face calamity. But it will taper down if the U.S. applies wet-foot rules to dry-footers.

The abuses have gone on for too long. Once Cubans know that they'll be forced to live in the shadows if they are smuggled in, then their U.S. families will stop risking lives and flouting U.S. laws by paying smugglers.

U.S. benevolence has its limits.

I was too swatchick. I didn't think they'd ever carry such a story - but, hey, surprise!

Oh, BTW, this one is a dupe. I'll lock this thread.

You can post on the earlier one at the link below:

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-127293.html