"If our attitude toward the rest of the world can be faulted, say columnists and commentators, it is only because we are sometimes too generous and too idealistic. We send food to starving peasants who for some reason continue to starve. We send peacekeepers (or the Marines) to troubled countries, and peace fails to appear.
How, then, could a country such as ours justify its shabby treatment of Haitian refugees? How could we justify intercepting the boats in which, over a course of years, desperate people were fleeing violent repression, only to send the occupants back to face further repression?
Well, the argument went, we were stopping the boat people for humanitarian reasons. The boats were unseaworthy (that's why we burned them once we'd taken the people off) as well as overcrowded. Intercepting those boats meant saving their occupants from drowning. "For Haitians who do seek to leave Haiti, boat departure is a terrible and dangerous choice," said President Clinton shortly before his inauguration, justifying his decision to continue returning refugees to Haiti.
Furthermore, State Department officials and others argued, most of these Haitians claiming to be political refugees were nothing of the kind. If they were, then why were so few of them granted political asylum by US immigration authorities? No, they were economic refugees, and therefore unworthy of special consideration. They were heading to the US because they were poor and wanted to be rich. But after all, we had poor people of our own to look after. We had no obligation to let in more. And in the end, the best thing we could do for Haitian refugees was to promote democracy in Haiti. For a country as powerful as ours, that surely wouldn't take long, and once we had done it there would be no reason for more Haitians to leave.
This line of argument cannot stand up to a closer look, and Paul Farmer's book The Uses of Haiti gives it a much closer look. Farmer is a physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who has worked with the Haitian poor since his first visit to Haiti in 1983. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1993, he used the money to endow a small annual grant for others who work on behalf of the poor. Farmer is also a trained anthropologist with an in-depth knowledge of Haitian history and politics. This gives him the rare ability to look at Haiti's condition on the levels of both international relations and village life.
The Uses of Haiti illustrates the power of this approach. The first half of the book presents a tightly reasoned, well-documented account of Haitian-American relations over two hundred years, with an emphasis on how Haiti has served the US as a compliant trading partner, a source of cheap labor, and as "stereotypical other," "confirmation of one's worst racist theories," and "all-around whipping boy." In the second half of the book, Farmer tells the stories of three Haitians he has known through his work in rural Haiti. "
http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/essays/article/?t=essays&f=abuses
How, then, could a country such as ours justify its shabby treatment of Haitian refugees? How could we justify intercepting the boats in which, over a course of years, desperate people were fleeing violent repression, only to send the occupants back to face further repression?
Well, the argument went, we were stopping the boat people for humanitarian reasons. The boats were unseaworthy (that's why we burned them once we'd taken the people off) as well as overcrowded. Intercepting those boats meant saving their occupants from drowning. "For Haitians who do seek to leave Haiti, boat departure is a terrible and dangerous choice," said President Clinton shortly before his inauguration, justifying his decision to continue returning refugees to Haiti.
Furthermore, State Department officials and others argued, most of these Haitians claiming to be political refugees were nothing of the kind. If they were, then why were so few of them granted political asylum by US immigration authorities? No, they were economic refugees, and therefore unworthy of special consideration. They were heading to the US because they were poor and wanted to be rich. But after all, we had poor people of our own to look after. We had no obligation to let in more. And in the end, the best thing we could do for Haitian refugees was to promote democracy in Haiti. For a country as powerful as ours, that surely wouldn't take long, and once we had done it there would be no reason for more Haitians to leave.
This line of argument cannot stand up to a closer look, and Paul Farmer's book The Uses of Haiti gives it a much closer look. Farmer is a physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School who has worked with the Haitian poor since his first visit to Haiti in 1983. The winner of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 1993, he used the money to endow a small annual grant for others who work on behalf of the poor. Farmer is also a trained anthropologist with an in-depth knowledge of Haitian history and politics. This gives him the rare ability to look at Haiti's condition on the levels of both international relations and village life.
The Uses of Haiti illustrates the power of this approach. The first half of the book presents a tightly reasoned, well-documented account of Haitian-American relations over two hundred years, with an emphasis on how Haiti has served the US as a compliant trading partner, a source of cheap labor, and as "stereotypical other," "confirmation of one's worst racist theories," and "all-around whipping boy." In the second half of the book, Farmer tells the stories of three Haitians he has known through his work in rural Haiti. "
http://www.geoffwisner.com/index.php/essays/article/?t=essays&f=abuses
