uvj at vsnl.com posted:
....Jose Pertierra, an immigration lawyer in Washington, said, "the Mexican route has become popular in recent years due to increased Coast Guard patrols in the Florida Straits. It is easier to get into Mexico because corruption there is enormous."
To cross into the United States from Mexico, all Cuban migrants need to do is say they are Cuban, he said. Cuba cracking down on migrant smuggling http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-04-12T225734Z_01_N12366864_RTRUKOC
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Capitalist State policy in West Germany used to be that one could become an instant citizen of the BDR if one was an East German who made it across the border. Sometimes the immigration policy of a State is used to undermine the economy of another State.</blockquote>
Far from undermining the economy of Cuba, Cuban emigrants are sending back to Cuba about $1 billion a year ("Latin America: Migrants, Trade, Retirees," <http://migration.ucdavis.edu/MN/more.php?id=3159_0_2_0>), a HUGE sum in an economy with an estimated GDP of $34 billion. In terms of remittances as proportion of GDP, Cuba is as dependent on remittances from its emigrants who are working in the USA as Mexico is: "The approximately 10 million Mexican nationals who reside in the U.S. sent back an estimated $20 billion in 2005, an amount equivalent to 3 percent of Mexico's GDP" (at <http://www.dallasfed.org/research/swe/2006/swe0601c.html>). Havana's attempt to crack down on migrant smugglers is probably misguided, unless smugglers in question have a terrible human rights record.
If Washington simply wanted to show how many Cubans would prefer to live in the USA than in Cuba, it could offer instant US citizenship and one-way tickets to the US to all Cubans who walked into the US Interests Section in Havana, rather than having Cubans turn to migrant smugglers or brave dangerous seas on their own. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>