Haiti’s History and the Life and Times of Edwidge Danticat 4

Laurent Dubois: Immigration to the U.S. for Haitians is extremely difficult. You know, there is a large Haitian Diaspora in the United States that has been expanding since especially the '60s and '70s but, through most of that time, the U.S. policy towards Haitian immigration has been extremely restricted. This famously became a kind of big controversy in the '70s and '80s because you had boats carrying both Haitians and Cubans fleeing two dictatorial regimes at the same time, arriving in Florida and treated completely differently, right? So Haitians were almost never granted any form of political refugee status, whereas Cubans were essentially automatically, at least most of the time. So the kind of Haitian experience of Haitian boat people traveling here has been one of tremendous difficulty. Ronald Reagan puts in place something called the Haitian Interdiction Program, which then is also used for Cuban migrants, but the goal being for the Coast Guard to essentially stop migrants before they set foot in the United States, because once someone sets foot in the United States they do get access, at least in principle, to a certain set of rights to make a request for refugee status.