[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 53 (Thursday, May 5, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: May 5, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                                 HAITI

  Mr. SIMPSON. Mr. President, at any point the managers of the bill 
wish to proceed, I will certainly yield the floor so that we might 
proceed. But in this gap in the proceedings, I wish to make a statement 
on Haiti. Of course, others have done that over the past weeks.
  I address it from a little different aspect. Obviously, the situation 
in Haiti has been deteriorating, and that deterioration has severely 
accelerated in recent weeks. We read of these attacks by armed Aristide 
supporters on military outposts and of soldiers retaliating by 
indiscriminately shooting people on the beach and in boats. At least a 
dozen persons have been reported killed over a previous weekend. Press 
reports describe the hacked and mutilated bodies of Haitian citizens 
lying in the streets and alleys, and we read of rampant smuggling and 
profiteering by the military and its supporters. It is now very clear 
that General Cedras and the other military leaders have no intention at 
all of complying with the Governors Island agreement.
  I do support the administration's interdiction policy. I supported 
the policy when the Reagan administration instituted it in the 1980's, 
I supported it when the Bush administration broadened it in the 1990's, 
and I continue to support the Clinton policy today. It is the only 
rational and sensible--but not politically correct--method of dealing 
with illegal immigration from Haiti under all of the present 
circumstances.
  I believe it is most unwise to bring into the United States the 406 
Haitians who were rescued from a wooden freighter near Florida on 
Friday, April 22, on the same day we returned another boatload to 
Haiti. And according to news reports, we allowed another boatload to 
land yesterday. We must certainly be consistent if we expect 
interdiction to be effective. It is not fair, in my mind, nor is it 
conducive to a sound policy, to bring some of the boat people to the 
United States and return others to Haiti. Our policy must be 
comprehensible and understandable. If we screen some of the boat people 
at sea or in the United States, then we should screen all of them at 
sea or in the United States.
  Mr. President, I have supported, and continue to support, the 
interdiction policy because without it hundreds of thousands of 
Haitians, fleeing social and economic turmoil in Haiti, would try to 
make their way to the United States. Many would die on the voyage. Many 
more would reach Florida. Such a heavy flow of unauthorized aliens into 
the United States would add to the economic burden of immigration which 
Florida already claims to be unbearable. And it would, I surely 
believe, further seriously erode public support for a historically 
generous immigration and refugee policy.
  However, I do certainly acknowledge that it is difficult to defend 
our Haitian policy in the face of this country's wholly uneven and 
ragged record with regard to refugees. The Refugee Act of 1980, which 
was crafted by our good colleague from Massachusetts, Senator Kennedy--
one of the first projects that he and I became involved with in our 
work in immigration and refugee and asylum, a continuing labor--
contemplated a case-by-case examination of each applicant for refugee 
status in order to determine whether or not that person had a well-
founded fear of political persecution.
  You cannot be a refugee or an asylee unless you have a well-founded 
fear of persecution based on race, religion, national origin, or 
membership in a political or social organization, period. We are not 
talking about economic refugees or political refugees of some other 
order.
  Despite the clarity of the refugee law, we annually admit 
approximately 50,000 persons from the former Soviet Union, who are 
presumed to be refugees simply because they are members of specific 
religions. We accept nearly every person who can make it to the United 
States from Cuba, no questions asked, simply because Cuba is a 
Communist country. We admit scores of thousands of southeast Asians who 
are treated as refugees not because they have fled political 
persecution but in most cases only because they have relatives in the 
United States. And then we offer green cards to tens of thousands of 
Chinese students who were in the United States at the time of the 
Tiananmen Square incident and claim they can never safely return home 
again, although many thousands of them return to China for visits 
during their school vacations.
  Our refugee policy is simply ``gimmicked'' to death. And that does 
make it highly difficult to defend the Haitian boat person policy, 
although I still do believe it is the correct policy under all the 
circumstances.
  If the President should determine that a current interdiction policy 
does not provide a reasonable opportunity for a person with a 
credible--credible--claim of asylum to be heard, what else could be 
done? I believe the three most likely alternatives are these:
  One, we could allow Haitians to enter the United States to present 
their asylum claims. In my opinion, this should be considered only as a 
very last resort. Such a policy would not be in the national interest. 
It would encourage hundreds of thousands of Haitians to attempt illegal 
entry into the United States, and it would do great harm and damage, in 
my opinion, to public support for our current, most generous 
immigration and refugee policy.
  A second alternative would be to resume screening of the Haitian boat 
people aboard the Coast Guard cutters which rescue them. That was our 
policy for many years, and it worked well. Despite its detractors, the 
fact is a U.N. asylum expert visited the cutters, observed the 
screening process, and found it acceptable. However, this process does 
not lend itself to processing a large outflow of boat persons. It 
became necessary to discontinue it after the boat flow increased so 
dramatically following the OAS embargo which was instituted several 
weeks after Aristide was overthrown.
  A third alternative would be to establish a refugee processing 
facility ``somewhere in the region,'' to which all rescued boat people 
could be taken for screening.
  Now, such a processing facility should be operated by the U.N. High 
Commissioner for Refugees to ensure a credible screening process. Those 
who are found not to have a well-founded fear of political persecution 
should be returned to their homeland, while those who do present a 
well-founded fear of persecution if they were to return could be 
resettled in third countries or allowed to remain in the processing 
center until it is safe to return. If third-country resettlement were 
required, the United States should accept its fair share of these true 
refugees. And this alternative, of course, is the most desirable 
solution to the problem. It should be pursued without delay.
  Both the Bush administration and the Clinton administration have 
``dropped the ball'' on the establishment of a regional processing 
center. Both administrations claimed that no country in the region was 
willing to have such a facility established in its territory, and that 
was, under the previous administration, and is, under this one, ``a 
copout.'' What these two administrations were really saying is that 
they were not willing to expend the foreign policy capital so clearly 
needed to convince one or more of our neighbors in the region to 
provide the location for a refugee processing facility.
  There is a very good reason why such a processing center should not 
be established on U.S. territory. We have demonstrated over and over 
again in this body and in the Congress that there is no such thing as a 
``temporary'' status or a ``temporary'' stay in the United States. 
Every time we have allowed any group of undocumented aliens or 
``refugees,'' particularly a group from a Western Hemisphere nation, to 
remain in the country ``temporarily,'' we have found they stay 
permanently.
  We just do not have the stomach to carry out our ``temporary safe 
haven'' policies with the use of enforced departure when it is safe for 
the aliens to return. We will not deport people after the ``horror'' 
has ended. And all of those persons and, of course, their legal counsel 
take advantage of these policies, and you may be darned sure of it. In 
fact, the workload for American immigration lawyers in this area is, as 
we say in the trade, ``significant.''
  Nicaraguans who came here in the 1970's during the fighting between 
the Samoza forces and the Sandinistas are still in the United States. 
After free elections were held in their country, Salvadorans who poured 
into the United States in the 1980's and who were given temporary 
protected status in this country remain right here, although the 
fighting has ended and the democratic elections have been successfully 
held in their homelands.
  The Poles who sought ``temporary'' protection here during the 
repression of the solidarity movement remain riveted in this country 
although their original leader, Lech Walesa, has now been President of 
that country for years. How can this be? I believe that all fair-minded 
observers must agree that ``temporary'' safe havens have just not 
worked, you cannot have fled Poland during the time when they were 
crushing solidarity and stay now that the leader of solidarity is 
leading the country. If you were really a refugee, you would go back.
  I have not heard of anybody that wanted to go back. In El Salvador 
they came here because five factions were going in and chopping each 
other to pieces. And now that is all over. You have democratic 
elections. Have one of them gone back? Not one.
  Remember, we gave them the temporary status because we said, ``We 
know you need this, and when conditions improve in your country, we 
know that you will go back like you said you would.'' Watch. None of 
them go back. And we do not deport anybody. That is not the way we are. 
That is against our heritage.
  But let us not keep fooling ourselves. Nicaraguans have free 
elections. Did they go back? Not one.
  So, the Bush administration was able to put together a broad 
international alliance to deal with Kuwait. It seems to me they could 
have done a broad international alliance to deal with the processing 
center in that part of the world, and I think Warren Christopher and 
company have some crucial work to do in this hemisphere, for a volatile 
situation is boiling away only a few hundred miles off the Florida 
coast.
  As I say, it was extraordinary what the Bush administration put 
together, the broadest international alliance ever known in history to 
deal forcefully with Saddam Hussein's misadventure in Kuwait. But that 
administration was not willing to have its own State Department make a 
diplomatic effort necessary to establish an offshore refugee processing 
center in the Caribbean-Central America region.
  The Clinton administration has surely done no better. It as well is 
unwilling to spend the diplomatic ``chits'' required to get one or more 
of our neighbors to provide the location for a processing center.
  I have very reluctantly supported the administration's determination 
to return Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti to head the Government there. 
I disagree with those who say we must send Aristide back in order ``to 
restore democracy in Haiti.'' Democracy was nearly as difficult to find 
there during the Aristide administration as it was during the previous 
cruel administrations in Haiti.
  President Aristide was ``freely elected,'' and that is, in my mind, 
the only justification for further efforts to return him to his office. 
Aristide showed us he was not a democrat during the months he presided 
in Haiti. When a freely elected Parliament would not cooperate with his 
administration, he used the mob to bully Haitian parliamentarians. 
Aristide encouraged his followers to employ ``necklacing'' to 
intimidate his opponents, and indeed, his followers did execute members 
of the Haitian military in this manner, an horrid activity which, I 
believe, had much to do with precipitating the coup which resulted in 
his exile. Perhaps President Bush is right and we should discontinue 
our effort to return him.
  We are now considering the imposition of a full blockade of Haiti. I 
doubt that blockade will be effective. To be successful we would have 
to have the full cooperation of the Government of the Dominican 
Republic, which we have not had thus far with the current lesser 
embargo. Nevertheless, a blockade is preferable to military action, and 
I believe we should first pursue that option.
  However, if the full blockade is not effective in bringing down the 
current military government, I believe we should consider military 
action. I believe humanitarian intervention to curb extreme human 
rights violations will support military action. It will not always be 
easy or ``clean,'' as we learned so dramatically in Somalia, but it is 
an option available to us.
  But again, before any military action can be considered, the Clinton 
administration must do its diplomatic work with a vigor and purpose we 
have not yet seen in this hemisphere--or in the world. The President 
must also do his political work on the Hill. As the Republican leader 
reminded us earlier today, President Clinton must first convince the 
Congress that military action is in the national interest. Any use of 
troops must have bipartisan support.
  While it is likely necessary for U.S. troops to provide the initial 
intervention, those troops must be withdrawn as soon as possible, 
certainly within 6 months. A U.N. or OAS force must then be prepared to 
move in--and stay in--until democracy has been established in Haiti, 
democratic institutions built up, a responsible police force developed, 
and an effective judiciary established. This might mean 2 years, or 5 
years, or 10 years--however long it takes--for we must assure that 
whatever force replaces the American troops is committed to remaining 
until the job is done.
  Mr. President, I believe that the United States will have to provide 
sufficient financing of an operation as I discussed for the people of 
Haiti and for the people of the United States.
  I firmly believe it would be far less expensive than allowing the 
current situation to deteriorate further. The situation demands that 
the United States and the international community take action now. We 
must lead, and we must act decisively without further dalliance and 
delay.

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