Wet Foot, Dry Foot: Cuba and Immigration
12/18/2014
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If the Cuban dictatorship stops stopping people from leaving Cuba, then the U.S. needs to change the current immigration privileges that Cubans enjoy. From Wikipedia:
The wet foot, dry foot policy is the name given to a consequence of the 1995 revision of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that essentially says that anyone who fled Cuba and entered the United States would be allowed to pursue residency a year later. After talks with the Cuban government, the Clinton administration came to an agreement with Cuba that it would stop admitting people found at sea. Since then, in what has become known as the “Wet foot, Dry foot” policy, a Cuban caught on the waters between the two nations (with “wet feet”) would summarily be sent home or to a third country. One who makes it to shore (“dry feet”) gets a chance to remain in the United States, and later would qualify for expedited “legal permanent resident” status and eventually U.S. citizenship.
There are 11 million people left in Cuba, more than three times the population of Puerto Rico. How has open immigration from Puerto Rico worked out for the U.S.?
Moreover, we need to end affirmative action privileges for Hispanics.

 

 

As I wrote in 2008:
Cuba has an enormous number of unemployed welfare bums. If a Cuban Deng took over intending to capitalize the place, it would be very tempting to do a Mariel boatlift and dump the bottom million or two Cubans on America.
A friend of mine who is a very orthogonal thinker has argued that the U.S. government should pay the Cuban government to take a few million of our welfare bums off our hands. The dollar goes ridiculously far in Cuba. I’ve never seen anybody agree with him, but he keeps bringing up the idea of a Reverse Mariel.
 
Here’s my 2006 VDARE article on the economic effects of Mariel. Here’s my 2008 article on the power of the Cuba Lobby.

 

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