Door from Cuba Has Been Held Open

Door from Cuba Has Been Held Open
Susan Eckstein on "special treatment" of Cuban immigrants
12.10.2015 By Sara Rimer

Cuban refugees float in heavy seas 60 miles south of Key West, Fla.
during the 1994 Cuban rafters crisis. AP Photo/Dave Martin, File
In December 2014, President Obama announced a historic agreement with
Cuban President Raul Castro to normalize diplomatic relations between
the United States and Cuba after more than half a century of Cold War
hostilities. In July, the two countries reopened their foreign embassies
and on August 15, John Kerry (Hon.'05) became the first US secretary of
state to travel to Cuba since 1945.

Now, argues Susan Eckstein, a BU scholar of contemporary Cuba and Cuban
American immigration, it's time to rethink another outdated vestige of
Cold War politics: US-Cuban immigration policy. For half a century, she
says, Cuban immigrants have been awarded unique immigration privileges.

"There are no undocumented Cuban immigrants in the United States,
because as a result of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 Cubans qualify
for legal residency after one year on US soil and then citizenship five
years later, even when they enter the country illegally," says Eckstein,
a professor of sociology and of international relations at the College
of Arts & Sciences and at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global
Studies. "No other foreign-born people enjoy such entitlement."

Eckstein has written two books on Cuba: Back from the Future: Cuba under
Castro (Princeton, 1994; Routledge, 2003) and The Immigrant Divide: How
Cuban Americans Changed the US and Their Homeland (Routledge, 2009).
This past spring, she was awarded a John Simon Guggen­heim Memorial
Foundation Fellowship to research a book about what she calls Cuban
immigration exceptionalism.

BU Today talked with Eckstein about her book and the tangled history and
politics behind US-Cuban immigration policy.

BU Today: Tell us about your book.

Eckstein: I'm focusing specifically on US-Cuban immigration policy and
bringing to it much broader issues based on my knowledge of Cuba and the
Cuban American community here. My book will be about the ways in which
Cubans have gotten exceptional US immigration privileges. People know
about some of the privileges, and very little about the politics behind
the granting of the unique set of privileges.

What is the history?
I'm going back to 1959—to when Fidel Castro took power. It was after the
revolution that Cubans started getting exceptional rights. They came
after 1959 on tourist visas and were allowed to overstay their tourist
visas without being subjected to deportation. Or they were let in
without visas and permitted, officially, to stay. People from other
countries did not have comparable privileges.

Then in 1966, under President Johnson, the United States passed the
Cuban Adjustment Act, which allowed Cubans who touched US soil to be
paroled into the United States. The word paroled has a specific meaning
in immigra­tion policy. It means temporary status. They were allowed to
qualify nearly automatically for parole and after a year change that
status to legal permanent residency.

You wrote in a Reuters essay that Cuban immigrants initially were given
special rights "to sap the Cuban regime of its talented citizens and
highlight Cubans' preference for capitalist democracy over communism."
So it was about Cold War politics?
Well, it begins as Cold War politics, but domestic politics become ever
more important over the years. Under Johnson it even involved "macho
politics" between him and Castro. Here's an example of macho politics:
in 1965, Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
which ended national origins quotas. He signed it in front of the Statue
of Liberty. He said that we are ending this aspect of our policy to
perfect our democracy. From now on, people will be let in on the basis
of who they are, not where they're from. It was a major speech of
Johnson's. He finished the speech, paused, and then said any Cuban who
wants to come may come.

You've said that this led to the initiation of US-overseen Freedom
Flights, which brought 270,000 Cubans to the United States between 1965
and 1973.
The key criteria for getting on a flight was family reunification.

What was Johnson up to?
In 1965, Castro had said to Cubans: If you want to leave, you can leave
through the port of Camarioca. Your family in the United States can pick
you up there. He said to Cuban Americans: You can come pick up your
relatives. Castro had no right to have Cuban Americans bring in
foreigners without immigration visas. So Johnson sought to outdo Castro.
He reacted by saying: Cubans, if you want to come, welcome.

What about the Cubans who came here through the Mariel boatlift in 1980?
About 125,000 Cubans came to the United States illegally in 1980. Again,
Castro announced that Cubans who wanted to leave could have their
relatives in the United States pick them up—this time at the port of
Mariel. Cuban Americans took advantage of the opportunity and sent boats
to Cuba. They ignored President Carter's efforts to stop them.

The exodus from Mariel has background. Both the US and Cuban governments
blocked legal immigration at the time. Under the circumstances, Cubans
who wanted to leave sought asylum at Latin American embassies in Havana,
especially at the Peruvian Embassy. Some 10,000 stormed the Peruvian
Embassy, thereby hoping to be able to leave Cuba. Castro wanted to make
his problems America's, by allowing Cubans to leave illegally—those at
the Peruvian Embassy and others as well. Carter tried to negotiate an
orderly air or boatlift, like Johnson had in the mid-1960s, but this
time Castro refused to cooperate. Some 125,000 Cubans took advantage of
the opportunity to leave from Mariel for the United States without US
authorization.

Castro complicated problems for the United States by loading criminals
from the country's prisons and people from mental health hospitals onto
the boats. They accounted for about 2 percent of the Mariels, but enough
to taint the image of them all. And they had to be put in our prisons
and mental institutions, at our expense, until the Cuban government
agreed to their repatriation—which occurred four years later.

No other head of state has ever gotten away with such defiance of our
immigration regulations. Castro was a deft strategist. He managed to
play to our weaknesses.

What happened once the people from Mariel arrived in the United States?
Once ashore, Carter allowed them to stay and granted them privileges
over other undocumented immigrants—except for the criminals and mentally
troubled. He invented a new immigration category for the Mariels,
"Entrants: Status Pending." That way they would not be subject to
deportation and they had legal rights to work, and they qualified for
special resettlement benefits.

Congress passed special legislation to entitle those from Mariel to
full, federally funded refugee benefits, to treat them as if they were
refugees, even though they did not meet the official definition of a
refugee—a person suffering persecution who applies for US entry from
abroad. From other countries, only true refugees are entitled to fully
federally funded education, job training, housing, food assistance, and
the like. Some Florida congressmen pressed for the special legislation.
They wanted the Cubans to re­ceive the benefits, but they did not want
Florida taxpayers to have to absorb the costs.

Carter conceded, and signed the legislation even though he said the
Cubans were not official refugees. Both Congress and the president
deliberately imagined the Mariels as refugees to grant them special
privileges. Remember, most Mariels came to reunify with relatives in the
United States, who sent boats to pick them up at the Mariel port. They
were not fleeing persecution.

Why did Carter sign the legislation?
Carter signed the legislation because he wanted the Florida vote in the
upcoming presidential election.

Although the Mariels got these exceptional privileges, their long-term
immigration status remained unspecified. Carter had entitled the Mariels
to only temporary admis­sion. Officially, Congress regulates immigration.

President Reagan decided, however, to reactivate the Cuban Adjustment
Act and entitle the "Entrants" rights to legal permanent residence with
a path to citizenship. Privileges upon privileges for the Cubans.

It's so complicated.
It's also unfair—this manipulation of the law, all to the benefit of Cubans.

Last year, nearly 40,000 Cubans came to the United States—roughly 20,000
with immigration visas. The others came without immigration rights, but
once in the United States, benefited from the unique entitlements of the
Cuban Adjustment Act. All these Cubans attain legal rights to work, to
stay, to citizenship—while we now have an estimated 11 million
unauthorized immigrants in the country without any rights.

Sara Rimer can be reached at srimer@bu.edu.

Source: US-Cuban immigration policy and the Cold War and domestic
politics that shaped it | BU Today | Boston University -
http://www.bu.edu/today/2015/cuban-immigration/