Wet or dry, policy should be the same (Miami Herald op/ed)

[Mika]

Wet or dry, policy should be the same
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/635724.html

BY MYRIAM MARQUEZ
[e-mail]
F or decades we watched them arrive, wet, tired, dehydrated, some barely alive.

They sacrificed everything to take to the sea on rickety boats or rafts like the one my cousin built to get here in the 1990s. Desperate, they even grabbed inner tubes like another one of my cousins used to get to freedom in 1966.

Now it's all about those Cubans fortunate to have U.S. families who break the law and pay smugglers 10 thousand bucks a head to bring them here.

After this country extends them every privilege under the Cuban Adjustment Act, some of them abuse the law. They pop up in Medicare scams and, when the FBI comes after them, they take the next plane back to Cuba or hitch a ride on a smuggling boat headed to the communist island.

As Miami Herald reporter Jay Weaver's excellent Medicare Racket series exposed, at least half of South Florida's Medicare fugitives are believed to be back in Cuba. Most of those scammers arrived in the mid 1990s. Some became U.S. citizens, then set out to bilk U.S. taxpayers of millions of dollars in false Medicare bills.

We don't know if these fugitives arrived legally with a visa or in smuggling operations. But their lawbreaking puts the Cuban Adjustment Act in jeopardy.

FLIGHT RISKS

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno, who has handled several Medicare scam cases involving Cuban defendants, is right to warn his colleagues about the flight risks.

''It seems to me that our thinking has to change,'' Moreno noted during a June hearing when he learned that Carmen Gonzalez, charged in an $11 million scam, had left for Cuba. ``We always think here in Miami that if you're a Cuban refugee, you're not going to go back to Cuba.

``I'm wondering whether a Jew leaving Nazi Germany can go back and forth to visit the relatives. I would suspect you couldn't.''

It hurts to see this abuse of U.S. laws, particularly when there are good reasons to grant asylum to Cubans who are true political refugees.

With Fidel Castro dying and his brother Raúl cracking down on civil society groups, U.S. policy on Cuba is at a crossroads.

If we want to put pressure on the regime, then let's drop wet foot/dry foot. The 1995 immigration accord between the Clinton Administration and Cuba all but invited human smuggling.

EQUAL FOOTING

It's an arbitrary policy that's applied haphazardly. A Cuban can dry foot on low tide but would end up wet foot at high tide.

Those caught at sea get sent back to Cuba or, if they make a case for asylum, get sent to Guantánamo, forced to wait for months, sometimes years, for a third country to take them. But any Yosmany or Yusmila smuggled into the U.S. gets to stay without having to show cause.

It's an abuse of America's good will.

The adjustment act should apply to those who qualify under the 20,000 annual visa and family-unification system. Since November, U.S. immigration officials have been expediting parole visas in an attempt to stop the growing number of migrants at sea.

Sure, smuggling will continue -- whether from Cuba or Haiti or anywhere people face calamity. But it will taper down if the U.S. applies wet-foot rules to dry-footers.

The abuses have gone on for too long. Once Cubans know that they'll be forced to live in the shadows if they are smuggled in, then their U.S. families will stop risking lives and flouting U.S. laws by paying smugglers.

U.S. benevolence has its limits.

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[Judi Lynn]

1. Apparently all the years of alcohol abuse have taken their toll on Judge Moreno's brain.

He actually said this:

``I'm wondering whether a Jew leaving Nazi Germany can go back and forth to visit the relatives. I would suspect you couldn't.''

WILDLY STUPID!

If they were in danger in going back to Cuba, then they wouldn't GO! Cubans would be coming and going continually from and to Cuba if there weren't laws here made to prevent it.

A Jew leaving Nazi Germany to live somewhere else was never unable to return to Nazi Germany, he just didn't want to return, thank you!

As you would be able to BET, Myriam Marquez simply forgets to mention the fact that Cuban immigrants are actually LURED here with a fully array of inducements created JUST FOR CUBANS, including instant legal status, instant access to a work visa, social security, food stamps, US taxpayer-financed Section 8 housing, medical treatment, even financial assistance for education, etc., etc., etc.

That's what the Cuban government was protesting years ago, when this diabolical plan to bribe Cuban people into leaving their homes to go to the front of the line in the U.S., and reap all these benefits never available to other immigrants was concocted. They SAID it was a deadly trap which could get a lot of people killed who tried to get to the states without going through normal channels, like buying an airplane ticket, etc.

These public mouthpieces for the Cuban hardliners never bother to inform out of state Americans of the fact some Cubans just go back to Cuba, to stay.

It's time to end the wet-foot, dry-foot policy, all right. Get rid of it! Get rid of the travel ban! Get rid of the embargo!