Joe Biden Worsened Haiti Chaos by Facilitating Middle Class Migration

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Alex Wong/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Haiti’s government has collapsed three years after President Joe Biden’s pro-migration deputies began facilitation the migration of critical reserves of better-educated Haitians, including policemen and politicians.

Haiti’s 10,000-man national police, for example, lost 1,600 police in 2023 — many of whom used Biden’s 2023 offer of “parole pathway” visas to join their relatives in the United States labor force.

“A lot of police officers have left in the Biden [visa] program,” Gary Victor, a Haitian writer told the Miami Herald in September 2023. “Haiti is a country that has no one governing it.”

“It’s the same brain drain issue [seen elsewhere] but dialed up to 11,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

It’s the most extreme example of what U.S. immigration policy does, in drawing off — not just the elite of a country because the top people in any country can leave if they want to — all of the people under the elite who keep things functioning.

The poorest of the poor — whether in Haiti or anywhere else — aren’t usually the ones who leave. It is the ones with a little bit of resources, a little bit of social capital, who can leave. And that leaves society stripped of the necessary elements of a leadership class.

Brain Drain

“Regarding skilled migration, around 80% of Haiti’s skilled human resources are residing mostly in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and Canada as diaspora communities,” according to an estimate posted by a Catholic non-profit group, Integral Human Development.

The brain drain has been happening for decades, according to an article posted by the American University in Cairo in 2013:

Some estimates show that as much as 70 percent of Haiti’s skilled human resources are in the diaspora. Meanwhile, it is increasingly argued that unless developing nations such as Haiti improve their skilled and scientific infrastructures and nurture the appropriate brainpower for the various aspects of the development process, they may never advance beyond their current low socio-economic status.

The result is a massive disparity between Haitians at home and abroad, said the author, Tatiana Wah, whose great uncle was forced to flee the island in 1957 by a dictator named Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. “While close to 32 percent of the U.S. Haitian diaspora has at least attended college or hold associate degrees and 18 percent hold a bachelor’s and higher degree,” shewrote, “only about 3.5 percent of Haitian nationals have attended college and only about 1.4 percent hold university degrees.”

But the brain drain has been accelerating and recognized since Biden signaled his welcome for illegal migrants in 2021 and then created a parole pipeline in 2023.

Haitian Emigration

Haiti is poor, corrupt, and badly governed, so many ambitious people want to migrate to the United States or other countries.

Biden and his deputies favor migration for business and moral reasons. They have allowed at least 7 million migrants into the United States since 2021, prompting cheers from his business allies who gain from the inflow of lower-wage workers, government-aided consumers, and apartment-sharing renters.

In 2021, Biden’s pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, registered the arrival of 46,000 Haitian illegal migrants. The inrush was so great that it created an encampment at Del Rio, Texas, damaged Biden’s poll numbers, and prompted a tough crackdown that deported 20,000 Haitians back to the island.

One of the arrivals was former police officer Jean Chrisbene Justin. He had migrated to Brazil in 2020 but headed north in August 2021 when Biden was elected.

My son and I traveled through Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia. From there, we walked through the forest for 11 days until we reached Panama. It is a passage that is taken by many. The entire way, we met other immigrants.

I lost weight during those days in the rainforest in Panama. I don’t like thinking about that time because I saw many people die. There were deceased people in the rainforest and water. Some children and babies too. Sometimes, my son will remind me, saying, “Dad, do you remember the people we saw in the forest?”

He is now living in Chicago, according to a June report in BorderLessMag.org.

In December 2022, Mayorkas provided “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) to 110,000 more Haitians who had sneaked into the United States since June 2021. The December decision bumped up the illegal Haitian population with TPS to 250,000, or a quarter of a million, migrants.

In early 2023, Mayorkas created a business-backed “parole pipeline” visa program that has moved more than 138,000 Haitians into Americans’ communities and workplaces. This legally contested program has been used by families, churches, and employers to “sponsor” migrants for visas to the United States

The total recognized inflow is almost 400,000, pushing the Haitian population in the United States to almost 1 million — or one in every 11 Haitians. This population is one of the poorest in the United States.

“As of 2022, nearly 731,000 Haitian immigrants resided in the United States, comprising the country’s 15th largest foreign-born population,” the Migration Policy Institute reported in November 2023.

HaitianTimes.com profiled some of the parole beneficiaries:

Aspilaire Revange received approval to enter the U.S. just two hours after her [US-based] cousin applied for her on March 16, 2023. She landed in Orlando two weeks after that, on April 1 … [Her husband  Frantz] Revange, 39, a civil engineer who now works in Orlando, was relieved to leave Haiti because of safety concerns.

The article notes that their 9-year-old daughter remains in Haiti.

The growing population of Haitians in the United States is helping to accelerate the exodus. in New York City, for example, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams is signaling a welcome for yet more Haitian migrants:

Middle-Class Migrants

Biden’s pathways are not intended to extract Haiti’s middle class. But the pathways are costly — either in smuggling fees or paperwork costs — so they tend to exclude poor, unskilled migrants.

Media outlets report many examples of Haiti’s chaos, which prompts better-off Haitians to take Biden’s exit options instead of staying to aid their own society.

USNews.com reported in June 2023 on the exit of Andre Samedi:

Samedi was briefly held at gunpoint last year after picking up his car from customs. The assailants stopped the 43-year-old in Canaan, a small town on the outskirts of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, and drove away with him. They eventually decided to let him go, but got away with the 2003 Nissan Pathfinder.

“Since then, I’ve been very scared,” says Samedi, who owns a shipping and electronic sales business. “I can’t go out often and only do so if it’s an emergency. When I do go out my heart races and I’m very stressed. The experience has left me traumatized.”

Samedi got the visa and flew to Boston in March 2023. “He was welcomed by his brother, who sponsored his application, and felt grateful for a newfound sense of safety. ‘I am happy to be in the U.S. because I have many family members here who had left and couldn’t return to visit because of the difficulties at home,’ he says.”

An August 2023 report in the Haitian Times funded by the Ford Foundation profiled a group of seven medical students:

INDIANAPOLIS — Years ago at the Université Quisqueya medical school in Port-au-Prince, a group of seven students formed a bond of friendship that saw them through graduation, the start of their careers as doctors and other milestones, including immigrating to America. Now, members of the seven are, or were initially, living in this Midwest city of an estimated 880,621 residents.

…

“We want to feel free, to feel comfortable, [so we live] with friends,” said Joseph, who asked to use a pseudonym to not jeopardize his employment prospects. “My roommate and I, we met a lot of others [in Indianapolis] who are from Haiti or from our medical school. We have a lot of young people here.”

Middle-class Haitians also flee to other countries, such as Mexico, Brazil, and Chile.

Escalating Migration

Amid the Biden migration, Haiti’s leadership class has collapsed, the island is in chaos, and U.S. officials worry that a wave of many more migrants may try to sail to Florida.

“The driving conditions in Haiti could very well press more people [to migrate],” Rebecca Zimmerman, a senior Pentagon official responsible for homeland defense, recently told the House Armed Services Committee. “We’ve recently approved some additional assistance that we can provide to the Coast Guard,” she told Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) on March 12.

Biden’s migration is a vicious circle that causes further emigration, Krikorian said. “The only way to break that vicious circle is to prevent people from coming here,” said.

Democrats do not want to recognize their role in the disaster, he said. They instead prefer to blame other causes, he added, saying:

For Democrats, it’s all racism, racism, racism. That’s all they’re going to say to maintain cognitive balance, and that’ll be sufficient for them because racism explains everything. In their own minds, they’re noble because [they beleieve] the reason this is happening is because of evil white racism … [Migrants] have a right to flee if they want to, and we have no right to keep them out.

Mayorkas — who was born in Cuba — has repeatedly explained that he supports more migration because of his migrant parents, his sympathy for migrants, his support for “equity” between Americans and foreigners, and his willingness to put his priorities above the law.’

In contrast, said Krikorian, “the Dominican Republic doesn’t want them there [so] they just build a wall with Haiti.”

Extraction Migration

Since at least 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the economy after allowing investors to move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.

The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.

The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced native-born Americans’ productivity and political clout, reduced high-tech innovation, crippled civic solidarity, and allowed government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded Americans.

The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.

The colonialism-like policy has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.

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