there is a difference between economic poverty of the type found in the Philippines, and communistic poverty found in Cuba today. In Cuba you become state property.
I think the difference is smaller than you'd like to think. Plenty of people here would gladly become the property of any state that would feed them daily and put a roof over their heads. That doesn't mean they admire socialism: the same people would give anything to emigrate to the US. They're just tired of being hungry.
We can imagine nothing worse than having the state telling us "you are our property and we can do whatever we want with you". We can't imagine the state telling us "you are surplus labor and nobody wants you, so you can either scrape along on the periphery or drop dead". If people are the property of the state, at least they know that somebody somewhere has a vested interest in keeping them alive.
Do you want to know what's worse than pressing 9 year olds into laboring in the cane fields? Sugar here is traditionally picked by whole families of laborers, who work together in the fields, paid by the ton for cutting, hauling, and loading. In the early '80s sugar prices collapsed, for complex reasons beyond the control or comprehension of the workers. The sale price of sugar was below the cost of production, so the planters simply stopped planting. The laborers had no work and no money, and thousands of them starved. They starved staring at tens of thousands of acres of unused fertile land, which they could not touch because it was owned by sugar barons who rarely if ever even saw their farms.
What do you think "freedom" means to those workers?
Another difference in the scenario you provide, is the underlying inference that he has no one here who can provide a decent life for him. I would submit, if a Hatian or Philippine family was willing to give their grandson a
decent home. And either country was being run by a communist dictator mired in poverty.
I don't think it would make the slightest difference. An underage illegal entrant from either of those countries would be immediately returned, regardless of anyone's will to care for him. It would never get as far as the courts. Of course if those countries were communist, that would change, because then there would be political mileage to be obtained from granting asylum.
My point is that the whole refugee issue is a political one, not a humanitarian one. Any entrant from Cuba is presumed to be a political refugee, even if he's only after the Miami lifestyle, and any immigrant from Haiti is presumed to be economic, even if the person is in real danger from a government which has generally been every bit as brutal as Castro's.
I hope you recall, when judging Bush, that phonies are hardest to detect when they are telling us what we want to hear.
Joey dealt with his loss very well, and thanks for asking. Maybe better than I did. The resilience of youth astounds me sometimes, as does the fragility. |
