Immigration Laws: January, 2002 - Number #7

A 31-foot sailboat carrying 185 Haitians reached Florida after 10 days at sea in early December 2001. The boat left Cap Haitien, Haiti, about 625 miles from Miami. The Coast Guard returned 1,453 Haitians between January and September 2001.

Haiti. In mid-December 2001, several armed men attempted to take over the Haitian presidential palace, lending an air of further uncertainty to Haiti.

The Royal Bahamas Defense Force has been apprehending 1,000 Haitians a month, and many more are believed to enter one of Bahamas' 700 islands. Earl Deveaux, minister of immigration, says the government believes immigrants are beneficial, and issues10,000 work permits a year. Deveaux says there are 5,000 legally registered Haitian workers in the Bahamas, and they have brought 13,000 dependent family members with them, who also receive residency rights. There are an estimated 40,000 Haitians in the Bahamas, making them 12 percent of all residents.

Carol Joseph, director of the Haitian National Migration Office, reported that there were about 2,000 known departures of migrants in U.S.-bound boats in November and December, twice the usual number for the period. Some 200 migrants believed to have drowned landed in Cuba, and were repatriated.

An Inter-American Observatory for Migrants' Rights was established in Santiago in December 2001; it will promote respect for Latin American migrants' rights. According to the group, at least a million people in Latin America leave their country of origin each year, including 150,000 Ecuadorians, mostly women, who emigrated to Spain since 1995. One study found that 36 percent of households in Ecuador reported in 1999 that at least one person had moved away from their home town or left the country in search of work.

Argentina. The Argentinean government announced an amnesty for employers with unregistered workers on December 5, 2001. Some employers will be eligible to put their unregistered workers on the books with no penalty or payment of social security taxes, and migrants can receive up to 12 months social security credits even if their employers did not pay social security taxes. Illegal migrants will be given special tax numbers to allow them to collect wages at banks and to initiate formal migration procedures.

Argentina's economy faltered, the government fell, and the new government defaulted on the country's $132 billion debt. The old government declared a 30-day state of siege after food riots and looting broke out across Argentina on December 19, 2001, and then lifted the state of siege and resigned after 29 looters were killed, some when immigrant merchants tried to protect their stores. Over the past four years, unemployment rose to 18 percent and per capita income fell by 14 percent. Food riots led to the removal from power of the center-left party of Raul Alfonsin in 1989.

The new government is led by the Peronist-Justicialist Party, which is divided among leaders who want new elections and those who want a coalition government of national unity.

Argentina, with 36 million people in a country the size of India, had a per capita income on a par with the US in 1900. The most popular explanations for the bankruptcy of Argentina include: tax evasion, the link to the dollar, and government debt. As many as 40 percent of Argentineans evade taxes, business often gets government aid, and politics are dominated by the populist Justicialist Party, established by Juan Peron in the 1940s. In 1991, Argentina fixed its peso to the dollar, with a 1 for 1 rate, which gave the government no flexibility in monetary policy.

However, the federal government and the 24 provinces offer overlapping services, and they ran up huge debts in the 1990s despite rapid growth. In some cases, the governors of the provinces defied the central government, which was trying to reduce expenditures to abide by IMF commitments. Argentina's default prompted proposals that the 183-nation International Monetary Fund should allow nations to declare bankruptcy and have protection from creditors while they re-organize their finances.