In 1980, Fidel Castro famously emptied his prisons and insane asylums and put the released inmates on a series of boats headed to Florida. U.S. President Jimmy Carter boldly responded by declaring an “open arms policy,” granting at least temporary residence to all of them, which by October had totalled about 125,000.
Though initially only about 1,306 of the migrants were identified by the Immigration and Naturalization Service as “having questionable backgrounds,” a more thorough study by the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel in 1985 found that up to 20,000 were criminals. In fact, criminality was so rampant among the Marielitos that it inspired the 1983 movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino.
Because vetting on the border is essentially nil, no one has any real idea about what percentage of Biden’s haul of Cubans are criminal. But in total numbers to date this fiscal year, he’s outdoing Carter by a whopping 50,000. Among the predicted two million illegals Biden will admit this year are 175,000 Cubans, the majority of whom are coming by land over our southern border rather than by sea.
Cubans–along with citizens of Nicaragua and Venezuela–are in luck as far as their chances of being allowed to remain here, because Washington does not maintain official relationships with those countries. Many of the Mexicans and Central Americans–who can be returned–are sent back under the auspices of Title 42, a Trump-era holdover Biden can’t wait to abolish, so that everyone can stay.
For more, see the NY Post.