The Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations has learned the hard way that the liberal demand that “all refugees” must be accepted, is in fact a recipe for disaster for all sides.
The Dominican Republic, Jamaica and the Bahamas, all agreed to take in refugees fleeing the January 2010 earthquake, as demanded by the United Nations.
Now, however, more than a year later, all those nations have found that they have taken on a bit more than for which they bargained.
The Haitian “refugees” have simply not stopped coming, and have caused serious social problems in all the receiving nations—so that all have now started deportations back to Haiti.
“It’s kind of an unsolveable issue,” Robert Maguire, a Haiti scholar at George Washington University was quoted in the media as saying.
“The truth is when Haitians leave, for the Dominican Republic and other places, they tend to do well or at least better than in Haiti, so they keep leaving.”
Now the “refugees” have been blamed for spreading cholera, taking jobs and driving up crime.
The Dominican police are, according to reports, “with little more to go on than darker skin colour and a failure to produce identification,” stopping cars and buses at the border and forcing them to return to Haiti.
In addition, the Dominicans are using a new law to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants and deport people who had been born and lived there for years.
“Deportees have also come from Jamaica and the Bahamas, according to aid organisations in Haiti,” the report continued. Even the United States resumed deporting Haitians several months after the quake, and US immigration officials say they expect to deport some 700 this year, “focusing on people convicted of crimes.”
José Ricardo Taveras, Dominica’s immigration director, last month, he cited estimates of the 500,000 or more Haitians in the country, telling local journalists that “nobody can resist an invasion of that nature” and that thousands of Haitians had been deported.
Alejandra Hernández, the minister counsellor at the Dominican Embassy in Washington, said Dominican health authorities spent more than £6.8 million for emergency aid in the month after the earthquake, and £16.6m in 2010.
“But refugees are now an economic burden,” Hernández said, using health, police and other services.
Unemployment in Dominica stands at around 14 percent, and cholera, which has killed nearly 6,000 in Haiti since October, has now claimed 90 victims in the Dominican Republic, many of them Haitians.
Tensions have erupted between Dominicans and Haitian “refugees” to the point where the International Organisation for Migration has set up a voluntary repatriation scheme, which pays Haitians £30 each, plus additional relocation assistance, to go home. More than 1,500 have takne up the offer.
Hence the lesson of “refugees”—an open door policy is not the answer. Genuine humanitarian crises must be addressed where they occur, and not be exported to other countries, as is currently the case.
Recommended reading on Haiti:
Where Black Rules White a Journey across and about Hayti
By Hesketh Prichard. In 1899, this British author was the first white man to cross the interior of the black island republic since 1803. This incredible book describes in excruciating, horrifying and sometimes amusing detail how, after nearly 100 years of independence, the black rulers of Haiti had turned this once-prosperous white-ruled colony into an unimaginable hell. P/B, 149 pp. illustrated. £10.20 Click here to order online.
And
The French Revolution in San Domingo
By T Lothrop Stoddard. The shocking true story of the race war in the French colony of San Domingo, now called Haiti, which raged from 1789 to 1805. During this time, 450,000 Negro slaves, 39,000 whites and 27,500 mixed-race persons slugged it out in a bloodthirsty conflict which ended with the complete extermination of every white person on the Caribbean island—and created the state of Haiti. The lessons contained in this book—on the ills of slavery, the incompatibility of the races, and the dangers of liberal ideology—are more valid today than ever before. P/B 316 pp. £14.35 Click here to order online.
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Indian ‘peacekeeper’ soldiers from the UN brought cholera to Haiti in the past couple of years, by excreting into rivers.
The disease was not present in Haiti before then.
If only all the liberal/left-wing idiots here in Government and in the EU would learn some lessons from this. One point needs to be made here though. Haiti suffered that earthquake over a year ago, so why haven’t the Haitian government and people rebuilt their homes and reorganised themselves? Why are thousands and thousands of Haitian refugees still finding it necessary to leave to find new homes and work? I think we all know exactly why, don’t we?