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Wet Foot Dry Foot

I might get into trouble somewhere down the road for saying this but it seems really hypocritical and unethical to me that the U.S. gives Cubans the right to stay in the country legally when they enter the U.S. illegally!

The U.S. has a wet-foot-dry-foot law which effectively means that if a Cuban shows up on land (with dry feet) in the States, he or she can apply for permanent residency and it will be granted. It doesn’t matter if that Cuban enters the U.S. illegally.

But how, praytell, does a Cuban get into the U.S. and onto dry land in the first place?

Well, they sometimes take a life-threatening journey in a rickety piece-of-shit raft, right? We’ve all heard the stories.

And the other common way that Cubans get into the U.S. is to get smuggled through Mexico and into the U.S. over land. Which of course provides business to the many human smuggling rings which operate in Mexico.

I’ve read that the price to smuggle someone from Cuba into the U.S. is $10,000 usd per person, but I’ve heard whispers that there was a recent price increase due to tightening of the U.S border.

Now I’m not going to give an opinion on Castro or his regime or Communism or any of that. But if the U.S. wants to help the Cubans it should ensure safe passage for them.

But instead, through it’s wet-foot-dry-foot policy, the U.S. encourages unsafe passage and illegal human smuggling.

And when a Cuban immigrant is smuggled through Mexico who do you think pays the fee for their passage? That Cuban can’t pay his (or her) own way out of Cuba, if he could afford that he could buy a plane ticket and leave Cuba on his own. So relatives living in the U.S. are the ones who are likely to pay for Cubans to be smuggled through Mexico. Which means that part of the money earned in the U.S., part of the U.S. economy, is supporting these human smugglers. Surely our lawmakers didn’t mean for this to be the case, but that’s what it is.

To me you either help people or you don’t! You either fight illegal immigration or you don’t! You either fight human trafficking or you don’t!

But you don’t dangle the promise of permanent residency regardless of how they get there. You don’t encourage people to risk their lives at sea. And you don’t encourage human smugglers.

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