Memory Lapse

The Clinton administration's refugee policy is a victory for welfare statism--and for Castro.

Virginia Postrel from the November 1994 issue

"You just can't grasp what it's like to live your life with someone telling you where you can or can't go--what it's like not to have the simple freedom to do what you want, when you want, to go wherever you want. I'm 37 years old, and I grew up knowing nothing but East Germany and knowing I would never know anything else of the world. When I stood in front of the Wall that night, I cried like a baby. I couldn't stop. "My dream, my real fantasy, is to go to America. I want to water ski in Florida." --"Sigrid," quoted in the Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1989

Who would have thought the end of history would be so literal? That, five years after the Wall came down, no one would remember how it happened or what it meant? That, five years after the Wall came down, its fall would be as meaningless to the president of the United States as the Monroe Doctrine is to the typical 10th grader?

Five years is not a long time, even in the life of Bill Clinton.

But there are 30,000 Cuban refugees behind barbed wire in the sweltering sun of Guantanamo Bay who can testify that Clinton does not know the meaning of the Berlin Wall. And that he does not know why it fell.

Ever eager to pretend he is John Kennedy, Clinton earlier this year traveled to Berlin and declared, "Berlin ist frei" (Berlin is free). "The Berlin Wall is gone," he said. "Now we must decide what we will build in its place." He has decided. Faced with his own Cuban "crisis," he has successfully begged Fidel Castro to build a Wall in the Caribbean.

Bill Clinton is a cowardly man. He is afraid, above all else, of political defeat. Castro has played masterfully to that fear, forcing a change in three decades of U.S. immigration policy and shoring up his government's waning legitimacy in the process. Castro knows that Clinton is terrified of Cuban refugees. They are to Clinton what Willie Horton is to Michael Dukakis--scapegoats for political defeat. Clinton blames violence at an Arkansas refugee camp in part for his traumatic gubernatorial reelection loss. To Clinton, the 1980 Mariel boatlift will always be the Mariel disaster. U.S. immigration policy is driven by fear of "another Mariel."

But the Mariel disaster is a myth. Of the 125,000 Cubans who fled Castro in 1980, maybe as many as 5,000--a mere 4 percent of the total--were prisoners and mental patients Castro wanted to get rid of. Of those, the U.S. government is seeking to repatriate 1,500, slightly more than 1 percent of the total. Yet this tiny fraction is constantly cited as evidence that Mariel was a disaster.

In fact, South Florida absorbed the refugees with some adjustment pains but without long-term trauma. Research by Princeton economist David Card suggests that the influx of Mariel refugees didn't even drive down wages or raise unemployment among existing Miami residents. Instead, the newcomers increased the area's overall wealth. Human beings are valuable, even in crass monetary terms; they produce as well as consume.

The Clinton administration's policy denies that value. And the administration has built at Guantanamo the perfect monument to the linked ideas of welfare statism and anti-immigrant nationalism.

It has seized people with family and ethnic support networks in the United States, with tremendous courage and initiative, and--based on the record of earlier Cuban refugees--with a high likelihood of self-reliance and low chance of welfare dependency. And it has imprisoned them in a mini-welfare state, where their basic physical needs are met but where they are to remain permanently alienated from the Americans who foot the bill.

The cost in lives is obvious, the cost in money rarely reported. One Pentagon estimate pegs the startup expense at $100 million, plus $20 million a month for 45,000 refugees. If Clinton wants to "end welfare as we know it," he could start by releasing these would-be workers into the Miami economy, freeing them to createwealth instead of living off the taxpayers.

As Msgr. Bryan O. Walsh, executive director of Miami's Catholic Community Service and a 35-year veteran of refugee work, told the Los Angeles Times: "These are the risk-takers, willing to sacrifice today... to have a better tomorrow. They make the best possible additions to a free enterprise system."

The open society depicted in Walsh's vision of free enterprise is an anathema to welfare statists. And it is equally foreign to the immigration foes who have relentlessly repeated for at least a decade that the free movement of individuals poses a threat to "national sovereignty." Refugees on rafts, they say, constitute an "invasion."

Treating families fleeing tyranny as though they were armies spreading tyranny has perverse consequences. It warps our sense of America--of what a free country represents--and of the crucial difference between individuals and governments. And it warps our foreign policy.

After a decade of repetition, we have begun to take the "invasion" metaphor literally, to reason that when threatened with such "invasion," America must repel the invader, by force if necessary. So the administration declares the invasion of Haiti a national imperative, not simply to "restore democracy" but, in the words of U.N. Ambassador Madeline Albright, because of "refugees coming to our shores, which clearly have an impact on the economy of the southern states."

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