January 19, 2010
4:30 p.m.
After the Earthquake hit Haiti of last year, America expected to have Haitians come to our country so that we could educate the people. We believed that even though their country was in pure chaos they deserved the right to be sheltered and educated. Since 9/11 the government has buckled down on security, which truly showed after the earthquake. No one was allowed over from Haiti without a visa, documents, and paperwork. “In 1980, under another Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, during a six-week period known as the Mariel boatlift, 100,000 Cubans were welcomed to the United States with open arms.” We can see from the past how much our views and regulations have changed. The only people from Haiti that can afford a green card, documents, and plane tickets are the wealthier class. Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Miami-Dade schools, was expecting to enroll thousands of survivors, but he was wrong. A year later the school had only enrolled “1,403 survivors.” Carvalho was expecting with the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere in such disarray that he would be helping and educating thousands of people than just a few thousand. The Miami Board of Education had to create Advanced Placement courses to accommodate the Haitians because they were of such high social class. Many of the Haitians are now looking to go to college in America, but the people we thought we would be helping to educate will have a hard if not impossible time to come to America.
I am not surprised by reading this article. It upsets me to know that we can’t help people like we use to, but we also have to protect ourselves and our own country. Haiti has a large crime rate therefore we can’t allow Haitians to come over without documents or green cards because then we wouldn’t be able to regulate what kind of people are coming to the U.S. Education is a wonderful thing that many Americans take for granted. Even though most of the wealthy Haitians came to America within the past year it’s nice that we are giving them education and even creating Advance Placement classes for them. It’s also wonderful to know that they are going onto American colleges and are making a name for themselves. We have to look at the positive here. The numbers may not have been what we expected, but at least we are helping Haitians at all. No good deed is too little. For the Haitians that cannot afford to come to America it is a shame, but hopefully the aid our government is sending there will help them improve and put back the country they deserve.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/education/16winerip.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&ref=education
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