Letters

From the March 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Emanuel Batler

Toronto, Ontario

Ms. Postrel replies: Perhaps Mr. Batler wasn't surprised to find out that the infamous Mariel boatlift contained such a small percentage of bad apples. I was. Based on casual media references and political rhetoric, I had assumed at least a majority of Marielitos were prisoners or mental patients. That perception, which I believe is widespread, is the myth of Mariel.

How many Marielitos were criminals is a matter of some dispute and depends on how you define "criminal." Some of the refugees were in fact political prisoners; others had been imprisoned for petty theft or prostitution, still others for being homosexuals. The U.S. government considered all of 60 sufficiently dangerous to detain immediately. About another 2,000 have been arrested for crimes in the United States serious enough to warrant repatriation to Cuba; Cuba has taken back about 600 of them.

I refer readers who want more details on the Marielitos to Charles Oliver's well-researched article in Investor's Business Daily, September 23, 1994.

The broader point is this: It is profoundly dangerous to deny freedom to individuals by lumping them in a group and letting the government determine the worthiness of that group. It is even more dangerous to base the worthiness test on a tiny fraction of the total group. Yet this kind of guilt by association is driving the entire immigration debate (not to mention the gun-control debate).

I fully expect to wake up one morning to discover an article in the Los Angeles Times reporting that an authoritative study has shown that 35-year-old white women from the South have relatively low IQs, are less likely than average to be literate, are more likely than average to be unemployed, and cost California taxpayers more than they pay in taxes. I suspect these "findings" may in fact be true. I certainly would not want my liberties to depend on proving them false.

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