Abstract
During the past four decades, from the beginning of the dictatorial regime of François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier in 1957 to the end of the term of the first democratically elected president of the republic, Jean Bertrand Aristide, in 1996, tens of thousands of Haitians left the island and resettled in New York, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington DC, New Orleans, and other American cities.
The protesters carried bathroom plungers, the weapon allegedly used by a policeman to sodomize Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant… They were all part of an angry but nonviolent crowd of about 7,000 people that marched… to protest the alleged police torture of a Haitian immigrant and demanded an end to what they said was an alarming pattern of police brutality [in New York City]
San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday, August 30, 1997, p. A3.
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Notes
Comment made by Aristide Zolberg at the conference, Becoming American/America Becoming organized by the International Migration Program of the Social Science Research Council, January 1995.
Among critics who have found US immigration policies vis-à-vis Haitian immigrants to be discriminatory and fundamentally racist, see Cheryl Little, ‘United States Haitian Policy: A History of Discrimination’, New York Law School Journal of Human Rights, p. 270 (1993);
Malissa Lennox, ‘Refugee, Racism and Reparation: A Critique of the United States’ Haitian Immigration Policy’, Stanford Law Review, pp. 687, 699n 96 (1993).
Joel Dreyfuss, ‘The Invisible Immigrants’, New York Times May 23, 1993, pp. 20, 21 80–81.
Gil Loescher and John A. Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945 to the Present ( New York: The Free Press, 1986 ), p. 175.
Joyce A. Hughes and Linda R. Crane, ‘Haitians: Seeking Refuge in the United States’, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal. 4 (7), 1993, p. 766.
President Ronald W. Reagan, ‘High Seas Interdiction of Illegal Aliens’, Executive Order No. 12324, 29 September 1981, Federal Register, vol. 46, 1981, p. 48–109.
Sarah Ignatius, ‘Haitian Asylum Seekers: Their Treatment as a Measure of the INS Asylum Officer Corps’, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, 1 (7), 1993, p. 120.
See Kevin R. Johnson, ‘Judicial Acquiescence to the Executive Branch’s Pursuit of Foreign Policy and Domestic Agendas in Immigration Matters: The Case of the Haitian Asylum-Seekers’, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 7 (1), pp. 1–37, 1993;
Andrew I. Schoenholtz, ‘Aiding and Abetting Persecutors: The Seizure and Return of Haitian Refugees in Violation of the UN Refugee Convention and Protocol’, Georgetown Immigration and Law Journal 1 (7), pp. 67–85, 1993.
See Aristide R. Zolberg, ‘From Invitation to Interdiction: US Foreign Policy and Immigration Since 1945’, in Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders: World Migration and US Policy, edited by Michael S. Teitelbaum and Myron Weiner ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1995 ), pp. 117–59.
According to INS, ‘an asylee must meet the same critria as a refugee. The only difference is the location of the alien. The potential asylee is in the US or at a port of entry, and the potential refugee is outside the US’. US Department of Justice, INS: 1993 Statistical Yearbook of the Immigration and Naturalization Service ( Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1994 ), p. 76.
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© 1998 Michel S. Laguerre
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Laguerre, M.S. (1998). Refugees and Immigrants. In: Diasporic Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26755-2_4
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