Retired Foreign Service officer Phillip Linderman has posted an article to CIS.org detailing a feature of our immigration policy you may not have been aware of. It seems that, for decades now, the U.S. State Department has observed an agreement with the government of Cuba guaranteeing an annual lottery whereby “at least 20,000” Cubans are chosen for admission to the U.S. “No other country receives such a privileged immigration quota,” Linderman says, and it should be terminated.
As Linderman describes it, the agreement was signed by President Clinton in 1995 to secure Fidel Castro’s support in cracking down on seaborne migrants attempting to reach the U.S. Castro agreed but extracted a key commitment from the United States: the promise of a continuing yearly quota of emigrants. He asked for 30,000; he got 20,000.
Contrary to what some assume, the Cuban government is ever anxious to allow dissidents and the otherwise disaffected to leave the island. The infamous “Mariel boatlift” of 1980 is the prime example, whereby Castro allowed 125,000 Cubans–many of them convicted felons and insane asylum inmates–to leave for the U.S., constituting one of a number of acute embarrassments suffered by the hapless Carter administration.
By the 1990s, conditions had worsened in Cuba, igniting riots and unrest that threatened to bring down the regime. In response, Castro devised a variant of the boatlift: authorities would look the other way if migrants wanted to strike out on leaky boats in hope of reaching America. Thus began the “Cuban Raft Exodus” of 1994. More than 35,000 took advantage.
As we said above, Clinton in turn negotiated his deal. Interestingly, he managed the immigrant status of each incoming class of 20K Cubans by resorting to the same catchall tactic currently being used by Biden with Afghanis, Ukrainians, and just about everybody: “humanitarian parole.” Linderman writes of the misuse of this authority:
While parole authority historically has been used in emergency and temporary situations . . . Clinton’s Cuban quota has become a permanent fixture and terrible precedent for U.S. border security. Instead of taking hard decisions to actually defend our borders and turn back illegal migrants, presidents can use the parole option simply to “legalize” the problem.
Not only is our immigration system distorted by such machinations, in this case we are actively engaged in helping “stabilize a tottering dictatorship” 90 miles away. The policy, now known as the “Cuban Family Reunification Parole” program, continues to act as the safety valve Castro intended. Here Linderman draws on his experience spent working for the State Department in Cuba.
During my three years of living and working in Cuba, I spoke to thousands of Cubans . . . all representatives of normal humanity understandably united in their desire to abandon “the Revolution” for a better life. Some wanted to topple the regime; most wanted just to leave. . . . One thing was clear to me: These people were vital actors needed to force political change, but instead the lure of the lottery pushed most of them to see instead their future in the United States.
Twenty thousand incoming migrants are, of course, negligible considering the massive numbers Joe Biden is admitting. Yet, as Linderman says, shutting down this “backdoor and misguided migration pipeline” would be an easy step forward.
We don’t really anticipate, however, that Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Nicholas Mayorkas, a native of Havana, will agree.
For more, see CIS.org.