President Joe Biden’s U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted a boatful of Haitian migrants and returned them to their society without triggering an avalanche of asylum claims, NBC News reported on March 15.
“The U.S. Coast Guard stopped 65 Haitians who were trying to flee Haiti by boat and sent them back to Haiti,” said NBC, citing an agency statement.
This policy suggests that Biden’s pro-migration deputies want to quietly avoid triggering a massive exodus of asylum-seeking migrants when many polls show escalating public opposition to his policy of importing poor workers and renters.
The sea interception prevents the migrants from reaching U.S. soil where they can apply for asylum. If they were allowed to reach U.S. soil to apply for asylum, their success would guarantee many more migrants — forcing Biden’s campaign deputies to either detain a large population of black Haitians or release them into U.S. communities during an election year.
Haitian migrants wade through a river on October 15, 2022, as they cross the Darien Gap from Colombia into Panama, hoping to reach the U.S. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara, File)
The boat interception also suggests that Biden’s top aides have rejected a proposal to let the migrants travel to Guantanamo Bay for “processing.”
On Wednesday, CNN reported that White House officials were debating whether to process Haitian migrants using the base as a gateway for Haitians to get into the United States. “The Biden administration is discussing using Guantanamo Bay to process Haitian migrants if there is a mass exodus to the US amid worsening conditions in the country, according to a US official,” CNN reported on Wednesday.
So far, the White House has downplayed the threat of Haitian migration and media coverage of the sea interceptions — likely because it wants to minimize its embarrassment about blocking black Haitians while welcoming millions of southern migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border.
A protester burns tires during a demonstration following the resignation of Prime Minister Ariel Henry in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 12, 2024. (CLARENS SIFFROY/AFP via Getty)
Biden’s deputies also do not want to cause problems for their allies in the business-backed pro-migration lobby groups. For example, NBC reported that the boat interception was denounced by The Haitian Bridge Alliance, an advocacy group that is backed by Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us lobby group for investors.
“There is a specific disdain when it comes to Haitian asylum-seekers,” said Guerline Jozef, a human rights advocate and co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance. “The first [U.S.] act is not ‘How do we protect the people?’ it is ‘How do we deter them and how do we make sure they don’t make it to our shores?’”
More importantly, Zuckerberg’s group is silent on the Haitian exodus even as it is calling for the award of temporary amnesties — dubbed Temporary Protective Status — to a massive population of migrants from Central American countries.
Overall, Biden’s deputies strongly support large-scale Haitian migration into Americans’ communities, housing, jobs, and workplaces.
Biden has already used a variety of pathways to help 400,000 Haitians settle in the United States alongside roughly seven million other southern migrants.
Mostly Haitian migrants prepare to board a bus from a shelter to a U.S. port of entry to start legal paperwork in Reynosa, Tamaulipas State, Mexico — on the border with McAllen, Texas — on May 19, 2022. (PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
Many of Biden’s Haitian migrants are middle-class citizens who can restore some civic order and democracy to their poor, corrupt nation. However, these relatively skilled people and potential leaders are being extracted by U.S. companies that are eager to raise U.S. profits by hiring cheap migrant labor.
In a March 15 article for CNN, Garry Pierre-Pierre, a U.S. journalist born in Haiti, wrote:
Just half a dozen or so wealthy families control most major industries in Haiti, primarily through corrupt monopolies, which are a big part of what ails the country. The elites control virtually every aspect of Haiti’s economy. They essentially pay no taxes. Much of the aid that has poured into Haiti over the years, including for reconstruction after the devastating 2010 earthquake, benefited the upper class while much of the rest of the divided island has continued to subsist in grinding poverty. Meanwhile, Haiti’s political and business elite has had a hand in much of the drug trafficking occurring in the country, long a key source of their income. In fact, experts have said that Haiti may be linked to the trail of most of the drugs entering the US.
…
Haiti needs help combating corruption and loosening the stranglehold that the country’s oligarchic masters have on its economy. Efforts must be made to enhance governance and to nurture and train potential leaders from the bottom up, as a way to forge ties between the government and the people they govern. It’s the best way to ensure that Haiti is never again ruled by strongmen and kleptocrats.
Biden’s migration policy is largely run by his homeland defense secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas is a Cuban-born, pro-migration zealot, who is also willing to be very tough on migrants when Biden’s top staffers require it. Since 2021, for example, he has flown more than 20,000 Haitian migrants back to their poor country.
Mayorkas has repeatedly explained that he supports more migration because of his migrant parents, his sympathy for migrants, his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners, and his willingness to put his priorities above the law.
WATCH — Mayorkas Rejects Economic Concerns over Migration: “Nation of Immigrants”
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