The Cuban Migrant Crisis

For several years now, there has been grimly regular news of waves of Latin Americans seeking refuge in the U.S., mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, where gang and drug violence have surged. At the same time, a stream of Cuban migrants has not commanded the same attention, but has revealed some of the vagaries and inconsistencies of American immigration law. Last year, forty-four thousand Cubans sought asylum in the U.S., an eighty-three-per-cent increase on the previous year. Most left out of concern that the new relations between the two countries could put an end to Cubans’ privileged immigration status, which, since 1966, has allowed them to easily obtain green cards. (The Cuban government has always objected to the American policy.) Rather than boarding boats to cross the ninety-mile Florida Straits, many of the Cuban migrants have flown south to Ecuador, drawn by the country’s lax visa requirements, and from there travelled overland to the U.S., through Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico. The reason for their elliptical route is simple: in the mid-nineties, the U.S. created a policy, intended to tamp down Cuban immigration, called “wet foot, dry foot.” If Cubans are caught on the water, the U.S. Coast Guard will send them back to Cuba, but if they show up on land—at the Texas border, for instance—they are granted entry and allowed to apply for a green card.