Can an earthquake have a silver lining?
Editor’s note: In this special report, students from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism explore how New York’s Haitian community is dealing with the emotional aftershocks of Haiti’s earthquake.
NEW YORK — Eleven-hour work days are the norm for Yves, a Haitian immigrant who hauls, assembles and sells furniture at a Brooklyn store.
The store pays Yves $400 in cash each Monday, and after paying his bills, he sends $50 to $100 back home to Haiti to help support 20 of his relatives.
Yves does not want his last name made public, because he — like an estimated 100,000 or more Haitians in the U.S. — lives here illegally like a ghost, weaving through an informal work network and dodging the immigration process. After the Jan. 12 earthquake, Yves scraped together $1,500 to send home. But he’s desperate to earn more money now, to help his family deal with Haiti’s earthquake-sparked inflation.
Ironically, the earthquake may offer a solution for them all: The Department of Homeland Security announced in January that Haitians living illegally in the U.S. can apply for “temporary protected status,” billed largely as a humanitarian gesture, and offering legal protection for those “whose personal safety would be endangered by returning to Haiti.”
In other words, deported.
Immigrants who obtain temporary protected status and their relatives back in Haiti could benefit. With legal status, Yves says he can look for a higher-paying job. That might allow him to double what he sends to family in Port-au-Prince, who have lost jobs and homes in the quake.
Those wire transfers by Yves and other Haitians working here are called remittances, and some immigration policy experts say they are crucial to Haiti’s recovery. They call on the U.S. to open its doors to more Haitians, give them temporary protected status and let them earn money here to send back home.
“One of the best ways to help Haiti is to allow some Haitians to move abroad,” urged Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Abrams called for a new migration of “several hundred thousand” Haitians to the U.S., Canada and France, which already have large Haitian diasporas. “Migrants’ remittances will be key to Haiti’s economic recovery for decades to come,” he wrote.
It’s a seductive argument, based on the role remittances have played in the Haitian economy. A 2007 report commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank said $1.65 billion had been sent home by Haitian immigrants the year before — about one-quarter of the country’s entire GDP. Almost three-quarters of that money came from Haitians living in the U.S.
However, some experts argue that because remittances go directly to families — alleviating some of their day-to-day expenses — and not to central institutions, they do not address the country’s structural deficits.
Columbia University professor Rodolfo De La Garza says remittances don’t build long-term development in a country.
“If there’s no foundation, you’re feeding farmers but not teaching them how to farm,” said De La Garza, a temporary protected status and remittances expert at the School of International and Public Affairs. “They don’t do anything but reduce poverty at the family level.”
“Just giving money doesn’t create services and infrastructure,” agreed Howard French, a former Haiti correspondent for the The New York Times and now a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. In a recent "Foreign Policy" article, French urged “a more structured and smartly financed way to mobilize and engage [the diaspora] in the rebuilding effort.”
French proposed creating a kind of diaspora Peace Corps, sending skilled, middle-class Haitians like doctors and teachers back home, at least temporarily, to help rebuild. For example, of the 15,000 Haitian-American nurses living in Miami, many could help rebuild Haiti’s health-care system, French said.
“Remittances are not a substitute for a middle class,” French said.
Meanwhile, a small army of volunteers in New York has set up legal clinics that help thousands of Haitians living here illegally to apply for temporary protected status. The clinics provide legal counseling on the I-130 process — an application that allows legal Haitian immigrants to petition for their immediate family members to come to the U.S. The clinics are helped by volunteers from the Red Cross and the New York Disaster Interfaith Services.
“Some [in my congregation] have been in the country for 10 to 15 years and are now applying for temporary protected status,” said Rev. Verel Montauban, who has ministered to Flatbush’s large Haitian population for more than 20 years at the First Haitian Church of the Brethren. He counsels the undocumented immigrants in his parish to not fear applying for the status.
But, “some don’t come forward because they’re still afraid it could be a scam” by the government to obtain their names and then deport them, said Marilyn Montauban-Pierre, the minister’s daughter. Her goal, as the de facto administrative manager of Haiti Earthquake Family Support Center, has been to allay those fears and schedule as many temporary protected status counseling appointments per day as possible.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, director of the Brooklyn Defender Services, said “only a criminal record could preclude them” from applying for temporary protected status. She hopes that the 40 or so Haitians who visited her temporary protected status legal clinic in Brooklyn will dispel fears about the process among other undocumented Haitians.
As words spreads, Schreibersdorf said she thinks increasing numbers of Haitian immigrants will register. They have until July 20, when the application period ends.
Many of the clinic organizers, like Montauban-Pierre and Schreibersdorf, also see temporary protected status as a way to help many of the thousands of Haitian immigrants in New York get on a path to legal residency or citizenship.
Yves, the furniture store employee, is among them.
“My hope is that it could lead to a green card,” he said, as he filled out a temporary protected status application at a Manhattan legal clinic recently.
Yves could wait up to 90 days to learn whether his application is approved. If it is, he said he’ll immediately apply for a management job at the furniture store. It would let him earn another $2,400 or so — a benefit to his family here in New York and to relatives back in Haiti.
More on the Haitian diaspora:
Flatbush: the heart of the diaspora
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