Before moving on, I read something that revealed a lack of understanding of the real world. Apparently some people believe that due to the chaos its country is in, Haitians are more deserving of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) than, say Venezuelans, whose country is seemingly in a much less condition of “chaos.” That latter is no doubt true, as is the fact that the country that Haiti is attached to, the Dominican Republic, is not a place that many if any migrants to the US originate from.
Now, the US has historically decried as “human rights abuses” efforts by left-wing populist governments that have attempted to “equalize” society at the expense of conservative elites, who the US regards as more “friendly” to its "interests." We saw this of course in Central America during the 1980s when the US attempted to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua while supporting and arming its right-murder regime neighbors.
Thus the US opposed the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela and that of his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Yes, Maduro is corrupt and a virtual dictator, but no more so than any other that the US has supported in the past, except that his “principles” are “socialist” and not “conservative.” Thus sanctions have been imposed on Venezuela, particularly—and rather hypocritically—by Donald Trump, who has no problem with undemocratic authoritarian regimes like that of Russia and Hungary.
The truth of the matter, as pointed out in a 2018 article in the Foundation For Economic Education, is that Chavez only “tweaked” who had power and wealth in the country, and that the economy and essential government processes hadn’t changed at all. Beginning in the 60s and 70s
Venezuela’s new leaders concentrated on the oil industry as the main source of financing for their reformist economic and social policies. Using oil revenues, the government intervened significantly in the economy. The government addressed general social reform by spending large sums of money on education, health, electricity, potable water, and other basic projects.
Increased public outlays manifested themselves most prominently in the expansion of the bureaucracy. The government established hundreds of new state-owned enterprises and decentralized agencies as the public sector assumed the role of primary engine of economic growth. In addition to establishing new enterprises in such areas as mining, petrochemicals, and hydroelectricity, the government purchased previously private ones.
This was all well and good as long as oil prices remained high, because the Venezuelan economy was (and is) based not on a consumer economy but a “patronage” economy, where basically only those industries that support the government receive oil subsidies. Thus those industries (especially agricultural) decided if they were not “supported,” they either drove up prices or kept products off the shelves (a shortage of sugar led to one government raid of a warehouse that found thousands of sacks of sugar sitting moldering).
As in typical hypocritical US fashion, Venezuela received sanctions against its “socialist” regime. According to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, these sanctions included
President Trump imposed additional financial sanctions on Venezuela in response to the government’s human rights abuses and antidemocratic actions.(?) In August 2017, President Trump issued E.O. 13808, which prohibited access to U.S. financial markets by the Venezuelan government, including state energy company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PdVSA), with certain exceptions intended to minimize the impact on the Venezuelan people and U.S. interests. In March 2018, President Trump issued E.O. 13827 to prohibit transactions involving the Venezuelan government’s issuance of digital currency, coin, or token. In May 2018, President Trump issued E.O. 13835, which prohibited transactions related to purchasing Venezuelan debt and any debt owed to Venezuela pledged as collateral.
In August 2019, President Trump issued E.O. 13884, freezing the assets of the Maduro government in the United States and within the control of U.S. persons. The order prohibited U.S. persons from engaging in transactions with the Maduro government unless authorized by OFAC. E.O. 13884 also authorized financial sanctions and visa restrictions on non-U.S. persons who assist the Maduro government. There are five individuals and one entity designated under this executive order, none of which were designated by the Biden Administration. To allow assistance to the Venezuelan people, OFAC issued licenses authorizing transactions involving the delivery of food, agricultural commodities, and medicine; remittances; international organizations; and communications services.
Alright, so in order for the Venezuelan people not to be “hurt” themselves by these sanctions, the US "graciously" allows food and medicine “assistance” to reach “the people,” in order for the US not to be accused of human rights abuses itself. But what did the GAO have to say about this? “A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that, despite those licenses, overcompliance with U.S. sanctions has limited some humanitarian assistance to Venezuelans.”
Brett Wilkins, who writes on human rights, further noted the hypocrisy of the US and international community at large, which sees a “Bolivarian Revolution”—i.e. the consolidation of Latin America as a kind of EU –level economic entity—as a “security threat”:
In 2015, Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat to national security,” a bewildering assertion considering the country has never started a war in its history. The United States, on the other hand, has intervened in, attacked, invaded or occupied Latin American and Caribbean nations more than 50 times and, as Obama spoke, the U.S. military was busy bombing seven countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. For decades, successive U.S. administrations have also lavished Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia — which has been condemned for its government and paramilitary death squad massacres and deadly corporate-backed crackdowns on Indigenous peoples and workers — with billions upon billions of dollars in military and economic aid.
So what does that mean? That the US only made worse the circumstances in which some Venezuelans have “migrated” to the US to seek asylum? And were they not “invited” to leave the country since Venezuela is a designated a “terrorist” state by the US?
On the other hand, what about Haiti, a country that started out as one of the wealthiest (per capita) in the Western Hemisphere (admittedly a very, very long time ago) to the poorest one, tied to the same island occupied by the Dominican Republic, which has the second largest economy in the Caribbean? Jared Diamond, author of the book concerning the de facto genocide of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere, Guns, Germs and Steel, told NPR that the difference between the two states was not about the land, weather or “racism” by the Dominicans, who saw what was happening in Haiti and wanted no part of it, but because the French and Spanish had different “priorities” to start with:
But the main reason is not geography, but is instead, colonial history, the different consequences of Haiti being colonized by rich France that brought in lots of slaves, and the eastern half that became the Dominican Republic being colonized by Spain, which by then was poor, didn't bring in many slaves and was more concerned with Peru and Mexico.
In 1804 when Haiti gained its “independence” after a slave revolt, France demanded recompense for the losses of their citizens in exchange for “recognition,” and these payments were enforced by a virtual naval blockade of their shores. Of course the US colluded in this by agreeing with the French that they essentially wanted Haiti to become a “failed state” in order not to give slaves in the US any “ideas.” But in 1862 Abraham Lincoln officially “recognized” Haiti as a legitimate state--perhaps in the hope that some ex-slaves in the US would move to Haiti as a few would to Liberia in Africa.
But US policy in Haiti changed with FDR’s “Good Neighbor” initiative, and since then the US’ principle goal was keeping Haiti from becoming a “failed state,” becoming one of its principle trade partners, sending billions in foreign aid over the years, and overseeing UN-supported “peacekeeping” troops to keep gangs and unruly rulers at bay. Unlike in Central America where the most violent gangs like MS-13 were bred in US prisons and then those “deportable” were sent to countries ill-equipped to deal with them, in Haiti politicians in the past decade have recruited and armed previously local gangs to do their bidding against their political enemies, much like the Nazis used storm troopers in Germany. Now the gangs are out of control and pretty much run the country.
Natural disasters have taken their toll on Haiti as well, but with a big “BUT”: almost since its inception, Haiti’s increasingly less-than-sound economy was once a major exporter of sugar and coffee; today it exports neither. It’s “biggest” export business at one point was lumber, and here we can see the result of this type of “economy”—with one side Haiti and other the Dominican Republic:
That massive deforestation with no effort to replace those trees caused massive soil erosion that not only made mudslides inevitable during tropical storms, but the change in the geography made the effects of earthquakes worse, and perhaps even causing them. In a story in environmental website Mongabay:
…the amount of mass eroded away from the mountains over the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake was sufficient to cause crustal strains capable of causing a vertically-oriented slippage along a previously unknown fault. This type of motion is quite unusual in this region, as most quakes in Haiti tend to be of the strike-slip variety, where the tectonic plates slide horizontally past each other. The fact that the 2010 Haiti quake occurred along a vertically moving fault lends support to the idea that the slippage was triggered due to mass stripped off the mountains by erosion over the epicenter, combined with the extra weight of the extra sediment deposited in the Leogane Delta clamping down on the northern portion of the fault.
It was one thing that the Dominican Republic at least tried to preserve its natural resources, but even during times of “presidential” dictatorship, such as under Trujillo, the priorities of the country was education and economic sustainability. This was quite different than Haiti, where the Duvalier clan drove out what was left of the educated and business class in the country for the sake of naked power. After “Baby Doc,” Haiti’s efforts at democratization were destined to fail since the country never had the “infrastructure” to support democratic processes—and because of that, it couldn’t “fix” its problems on its own, and even assistance from the US has failed to do anything but keep what’s left of the country from mass starvation and death.
So essentially the question is who is more at fault for why someone would leave for their country to seek asylum in the US? Venezuelans who are suffering from US-sanctions that hurt them as much as the government the US claims to be aiming its bullets at—or those who have shown an inability to govern themselves without massive outside assistance? The thing is, why even engage in such a pity-party and self-absorption against another group at all, especially if you can’t face the truth?
Oh, while we are at it, the “border crisis” as a political stunt continues apace. People blame the Biden administration, but that is simply a fallacy for the ignorant. A paper released by the NIH on the “unintended consequences" of the 1965 immigration law, which while supposedly intended to end “discriminatory quotas” on Asian and African immigrants, had the opposite intent in regard to Latin American immigration, putting quotas on their numbers when previously there had been none, their numbers restricted only for “qualitative” reasons.
But the real disastrous effect of the 1965 immigration law on Latin American immigration culture was the ending of the Bracero program, which was a direct result of complaints by “native” groups—particularly blacks—who saw the program as an “infringement” on their “civil rights” in regard to job opportunities.
The paper noted that
The second order of business for immigration reformers with a civil rights agenda was ending a scheme admitting short-term foreign workers known as the Bracero Program. Originally established in 1942 as a temporary wartime measure, the program was extended by Congress and massively expanded in the latter half of the 1950s. By the 1960s, however, the Bracero Program had come to be seen as an exploitive labor regime on a par with Southern sharecropping, and in 1964, over vociferous objections from Mexico, Congress voted to terminate it. The program was phased out between 1965 and 1967 and the flow went to zero in 1968, the same year the new cap on immigration from the Western Hemisphere took effect.
The paper noted that “Immigration
was a back burner issue for most Americans in the 1960s.” This was because
legal work permits allowed by the Bracero program created a “circular” pattern
of entry, since migrants knew they could enter and leave the country “legally”
in order to work—thus their presence was largely “invisible” to most Americans.
In the decade prior to 1965, it was typical that 450,000 migrants would enter
and leave the country through the Bracero program, while an estimated 50,000
would enter the country on a “permanent” basis. "Illegal" immigration was just for the relatively few "desperate" characters.
But that changed dramatically and disastrously after the end of the Bracero program:
Given this large annual inflow, the sudden elimination of the Bracero Program clearly would have dramatic consequences on migration between Mexico and the United States; and with the imposition of a hemispheric cap, and eventually country quotas, the displaced temporary migrants were not going to be accommodated within the system for legal immigration.
Those businesses (particular in agriculture) that relied on those migrant workers were suddenly left without a stable workforce. Blacks and those who had their own prejudices against Hispanics hypocritically and chose to see this as a “civil rights” issue did not come rushing to work in the fields. Employers who had relied on migrant labor were given little choice but to “look the other way” when it came to who they could find to work, and that tended to be the same people they had been employing for decades under the Bracero program—legal or illegal.
Thus the end of the legal ability to enter the country to work on a temporary basis halted the prior natural inflow-outflow of migrants. This graphic shows how the number of temporary migrant workers flipped to illegal entry, and effect of this was instead of a legal “temporary” presence, you saw a more “permanent” illegal presence:
Immigration laws that tried to “fix” the problem only made matters worse—by making legal entry even more difficult, refusing to increase legal work visas and making working migrants “criminals.” Yet as the Brookings Institute reported, many industries are in desperate need of their labor, and that labor has been a boon to the US economy, with higher than expected GDP increase. NBC News reported last week about how this dynamic is playing out in the town of Fremont, Nebraska. It survives on its meat processing plants, but “legal” workers have only filled 39 out of every 100 jobs required:
Thus while hypocritically denouncing illegal immigration publicly, the townspeople have tended to turn a blind eye to the fact that many if not most of the workers who are filling the large majority of those jobs may not be “legal.”
Yet all we hear about is the “chaos” and “crisis” at the border without even bothering to know why this has come about, only about how to “stop” it. This “crisis” could have been stopped 60 years ago by not making foolish, short-sighted and racist immigration policies targeting Hispanics.
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