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Obama Ends “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” Policy for Cuban Refugees
America will, per a new last-minute decree from Obama, no longer automatically grant asylum to Cubans who make it to US shores. Instead, Cuban refugees (and they really are refugees from that island hellhole) will automatically be sent back to Cuba, overturning a policy that has been in effect since Castro seized control of the island nation. The current policy (known as Wet Foot / Dry Foot) was a product of the Clinton administration, and stipulated that Cubans had to actually touch US soil, where before they were given asylum merely for being picked up at sea.
I cannot help but think that this is part of Obama’s attempts to poke as many people as he can on his way out the door, for Obama must know that such people, when returned to Cuba, are likely to be imprisoned.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is ending a longstanding immigration policy that allows any Cuban who makes it to U.S. soil to stay and become a legal resident, a senior administration official said Thursday.
The repeal of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy is effective immediately, according the official. The decision follows months of negotiations focused in part on getting Cuba to agree to take back people who had arrived in the U.S.
The U.S. and Cuba planned to issue a joint statement late Thursday. The official insisted on anonymity in order to detail the change ahead of the announcement.
The official said the Cubans gave no assurances about treatment of those sent back to the country, but said political asylum remains an option for those concerned about persecution if they return.
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The “wet foot, dry foot” policy was put in place in 1995 by President Bill Clinton as a revision of a more liberal immigration policy. Until then, Cubans caught at sea trying to make their way to the United States were allowed into the country and were able to become legal residents after a year. The U.S. was reluctant to send people back to the communist island then run by Fidel Castro, and the Cuban government also generally refused to accept repatriated citizens.
The Cuban government has in the past complained bitterly about the special immigration privileges, saying they encourage Cubans to risk dangerous escape trips and drain the country of professionals. But it has also served as a release valve for the single-party state, allowing the most dissatisfied Cubans to seek better lives outside and become sources of financial support for relatives on the island.
For a look at the cultural impact of our Cuba policy, I recommend everyone to pick up a copy of Back to Blood, by Thomas Wolfe. I also suggest viewing Peter Robinson’s interview with Wolfe, given shortly after the book came out.
Published in General
So…..Obama built a bureaucratic wall to keep immigrants out, and Cubans will pay for it….
Did I get that right?
True. Might of if I had thought of it.
Nah, I was pretty young when that film came out and it seemed to be getting a lot of good reviews. Roman Polanski directed it, and I innocently went to see it. It sickened me so much, I nearly up-chucked in the theater but did make it to the ladies. Did not finish watching the rest of the film. Polanski was an evil man, evil things happened to his wife and friends, and he did evil things to children. Whoopie Goldberg said of him, “what he did to a child wasn’t really rape-rape.” As if drugging a child and raping her in every orifice of her body wasn’t considered real rape.
In the eyes of Leftists, nothing a fellow Leftist does is as bad as anything a non-leftist does or might do.
Of course, and Meryle Streep applauded Polanski at the Globe awards while scolding Trump for being crude.
Anyone who has spent even a fraction of their life ‘checking’ out the background of our current ‘Narcissistic ideologue’ should easily understand that he is first: his most favorite person- he wrote two books about himself before he was 45 (he wrote his first book at 34).
And second- EVERYTHING is about ideology. He doesn’t give a bag of dog poop about anything that isn’t about ideology. He cares not a whit about how anything actually works, or how things function, he only concerns himself with the rainbow unicorn version of ideological nirvana, everything is filtered through that ‘vision’.
Cuba is just more of the same, he doesn’t care about the Cubans just the ideology and he wishes the US could be more ideologically like Cuba, not the ‘not exceptional’ America.
A pox on false equivalency and self righteousness.
Another example (along with his collusion on the recent anti-Israel resolution at the U.N.) of how petty and petulant a man President Obama is. Another example of foreign policy as spite.
This would be an excellent time for him to shore up the support of alienated Miami Cubans, especially the younger and less Republican ones.
Which makes me worry that there’s some kind of hidden angle in this for Obama……to echo the words of another poster, even HE can’t be THAT petulant and stupid, can he?
Then I remember who I’m talking about, and start to relax a little.
The Left has been particularly myopic with regards to Cuba. For many Progressives, there’s this desire to see Socialism succeed, and so they willfully ignore just how bad it is in Cuba (all the while touting its wonderful free health care). Those Progressives who visit remain in the Potemkin Village areas and delude themselves, and tell themselves that if America was just nicer, Cuba would be a paradise.
It’s easy to ignore pain and suffering when you refuse to even see.
What’s amazing about it? It’s how they roll. Chicago rules baby.
Actually this makes perfect sense, when it comes to immigration and demographically base voting analysis. Democratic immigration policy can be summed up with one purpose, getting more liberal voters. the reason Democrats want Muslims as they overwhelmingly vote Democrat. Where is Cubans are the only group that all under the absurd race classification “Hispanics” have a decent majority that are Republican. There the only Spanish demographic that really is much more Republican than Democrat.Puerto Ricans are about the average but the rest of the cultures tend to vote democrat. Obama is just implementing policies based on the long-term tradition of Democrats doing all thay can to reduce likely Republican voters and maximize likely Democratic voters when it comes to immigration policy. that’s really all this is all about.
Ha. You’re so right.
Oh get over yourself. When we were in the Cold War, we took refugees from Communist countries, but we kept careful tabs on them, as they could have been spies from the other side. We did this especially for those that worked in occupations close to our government, military, military research, etc.
Now we’re in a war with radical Islamism, but their spies don’t try to infiltrate our government, they just go on shooting sprees. We still take in refugees from all over the world. There’s just serious debate whether we should take them from the few countries where radical Islamism is based. You don’t see Republicans hating on North Korean or Venezuelan refugees.
Bingo! It’s all about whether these immigrants as future volts will have a likely R or D on their voter registration.
So this proves that Obama is just a troll, right?
I mean, there’s no reason to expect the policy to stand, and he did it days before the term was over, so the point is to merely piss Americans who don’t like this off, right? Same with letting the Israel condemnation at the UN pass.
Has Obama done anything in eight years whose end goal was not to piss off half or more of the United States?
Go ahead, don’t be afraid to say what you really mean…☺
Well think of it this way, half of the nation just completely rejected Obama’s entire legacy and did so in a manner that he has to view as humiliating. So when you are a thin-skinned, narcissistic, petty child-man named Barrack Obama, what’s your next move?
He is already hated by half of America, so he doesn’t care if another quarter of us also gets pissed off. Should make his legacy. I think he will be surprised that not many American citizens will pay much attention to him. He has nothing to give them anymore and he is past his use by date..
I see your point, and wondered the same: what makes a Cuban refugee a quicker entry than any other refugee?
What bothers me about this recent Obamanation is that he is undoing something from 1995, now. It just seems vindictive, to use fleeing Cubans as pawns in the political gameboard.
My initial response, after “redacted for CoC” is that Cuban refugees, all refugees, should be vetted.
But don’t miss the main point; being ‘hated’ by people he disagrees with merely reinforces and vindicates his ideology and the ‘proof’ that he is right.
He’s extremely thin skinned but its with petty people who don’t understand his rainbow unicorn vision of the perfect world and he can’t help it if people of the dirt can’t raise above their ignorance, they are just stoopid, clinging to God and guns (unless those are Muslims with guns- religion of ‘peace’ and all that).
With folks like Valerie Jarret, fawning and preening celebrities and the MSM, he lives in the Michael Jackson bubble of perfect greatness, there is no ‘toe stubbing’ for Saint Barrack.
There has been a long standing exception in the Conservative strong borders argument for “screwing communists.” The number of Cubans we’re talking about isn’t that many, 56k last year. That’s about a quarter of what Mexico sends (assuming things have been fairly constant since 2008, last year I could find data). We had a similar position on Russian immigration from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Notably, our position vis a vis Russia changed when there were a.) a lot more refugees, and b.) another place they could go (Jews going to Israel). That strikes me as a reasonable position. If the rate of Cuban emigration keeps going up, if they can go other places (Mexico apparently is pretty good, too), I’d be open to closing the exception -but we should discuss it. Not just do it.
Hopefully Trump has a magic eraser for all of Obama’s egregious executive orders.
This Cuban thing was an executive order, right?
Obama is a wrecking ball. But he’s got one week left. This is what a dictatorship looks like.
This is what Congress looks like when it outsources all these legislative decisions to the executive branch so it can concentrate on pork and constituent services.
A thousands likes.
And also, as my husband just said when we were talking about the same thing, so the legislators cannot be held responsible by their constituents for bad things that happen: “It wasn’t my fault.”
Let us never forget that we have a right to regulate who crosses our borders and who gets to stay. That’s inherent in the very word “border”.
It is to be expected that there will be disagreement on the policies and choices in this regard, and that’s fine, but I just hope in every case the decisions are made based on what’s best for American citizens before all else, rather than just “what will keep me and my cronies on top.”