Law Favoring Cuban Arrivals Is Challenged

[Judi Lynn]

Law Favoring Cuban Arrivals Is Challenged
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
FEB. 1, 2015

MIAMI — In the wake of President Obama’s move to rekindle diplomatic ties with Cuba, Cuban-American legislators in Washington and local officials in Florida are calling for reconsideration of a once-sacrosanct element of American foreign policy — the 1966 law that gives Cubans broader protections than any other immigrants arriving in the United States.

Critics of the law, joined by the hard-line Cuban-American congressional delegation, say it is being abused by recent waves of Cuban arrivals who regularly travel back and forth between Cuba and the United States as economic, not political, refugees.

Written during the height of tensions with the Soviet Union, the Cuban Adjustment Act was meant to offer safe haven for Cuban refugees fleeing oppression from their Communist government. The law allows all Cubans who reach the United States, legally or illegally, to become permanent residents in a year and a day. Five years later, they can become United States citizens.

The law is still popular with most Cubans in Florida. But influential Cuban-American politicians argue that the moves to normalize relations undercut the rationale for the law — that it protected refugees from an outlaw government at a time they did not have the option of returning home.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/02/us/law-favoring-cuba-arrivals-is-challenged.html?_r=0

[Downwinder]

1. I have wondered why some of the Dreamers

have not tried that route.

When the US throws them out, take their education to Cuba and get Citizenship. Then escape to the US.

[Mika]

2. Cuba has very restrictive immigration laws.

Pretty much the only way to gain Cuban citizenship is to be married to a Cuban in Cuba.

[Downwinder]

3. That would explain it.

[Daniel537]

4. The President can effectively end most of the CAA with the stroke of a pen

Both the provisions that allow Cubans to enter by way of Port of Entry in Mexico or Canada (Meissner Memo), and the Wet-Foot/Dry-Foot rule are Executive interpretations of the CAA. Remove that, and the only way a Cuban can adjust status here is by first entering the US legally and then claiming asylum. More importantly for Cuba, he can and should end the Medical Parole Program which grants visas to Cuban doctors anywhere in the world to encourage them to desert. The NY Times accurately called this a brain drain, and noted the hypocrisy of praising the Cuban Health Care system while simultaneously trying to destroy it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/opinion/a-cuban-brain-drain-courtesy-of-us.html