Would we like to see regime change in Haiti? Would we like to lessen, if not eliminate, the influence of crooks in that poverty-stricken country?
Of course we would, but the Biden administration has just made another open-borders decision on migration that will work (on a small scale) in exactly the opposite direction. The current decision deals with Haiti; an earlier and similar one was made regarding Cuban migration, as Philip Linderman has reported recently.
One of the ways to keep bad people in power is to facilitate the departure of their enemies, the reformers; the opposite is equally true: Preventing potential revolutionaries from leaving a nation builds up the power of the regime’s critics.
People wanting to leave Haiti have exactly the set of characteristics that suggests they would be reformers were they to stay put. Since they want to leave that country, they must be unhappy there now. Further, they have the wit, the will, and the skills to cope with our immigration system — the very talents that would be useful in reform movements. So enhancing their departures eases the pressure on the current regime.
This is a truism that the U.S. government has never learned; this is a major reason why the Castros and their allies have been running Cuba for 60 years now.
On Friday, June 10, the Biden administration recreated a parole program to cut the waiting periods for migrants to come from Haiti to the U.S. There are country-of-origin limits on legal immigration to the U.S. and they have been in place, in one form or another, for over 100 years. This move will — without any congressional authorization — dilute the impact of these limits for Haiti. (Cubans are treated roughly the same way in another ruling.)
The “Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program” will allow an as-yet-undefined group of aliens already approved for chain migration to come to the U.S. on parole even though their applications are not ripe for utilization. (There is a multi-million backlog of such applications for Haiti, Cuba, and the rest of the world.) This means that Haitians and Cubans will jump the queue that applies to everyone else.
The headline in the DHS announcement speaks of “Resuming and Increasing Participation in the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program”. (Emphasis added.) Just what the increase will be, or how it is justified, is not explained.
The history of the program is interesting and shows, among other things, the varying speeds used by the Trump and Biden administrations to deal with similar policy situations.
The parole-the-Haitians-in-ahead-of-time policy was created by the Obama administration in 2014. The Trumps were unhappy with it, but waited until the 47th month of their four years to modify and reduce it, which they did with a proposed regulation in December 2020. The Bidens, working a little more rapidly, reversed the Trump policy in their 15th month in office and did so without any such nicety as inviting comments.