Pushing Open the Doors: Immigration Reform After the Disaster In Haiti

Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD), a non-partisan think tank in Washington, D.C. Since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Clemens has advocated for the liberalization of U.S. immigration laws as the one of the best ways to help the quake victims. For the last six months, he has focused on extending the H-2 visa program for temporary and seasonal workers. On January 18, 2012, as a result of CGD’s initiative, the Obama administration revised the H-2 policy to include Haitian migrants.

In a recent blog post, you write, “Ending Haiti’s H-2 visa exclusion is to my knowledge the first time in at least half a century that U.S. admission policy was changed, even in part, in response to increased need in the wake of a disaster.” Do you have any theories as to why this disaster in particular led to a change in U.S. policy? Why did it take so long?

There are certain things that are specific to Haiti. The U.S. has had a close relationship with Haiti for a long time. The U.S. has been involved three times in the occupation of Haiti, including a twenty-year period beginning in 1915, in 1994, and in 2004 in conjunction with the United Nations. Furthermore, many government officials have personal ties to Haiti; Hillary Clinton, for example, honeymooned there. The scale is also unique; the earthquake was one of the most devastating disasters in history. Between 1.5 and 2.5 percent of Haiti’s population was killed; in the U.S., 1.5 percent of the population is equivalent to the entire population of Louisiana. Thus, there were reasons for the U.S. to be especially concerned. However, the changes in the H-2 visa policy would not have come about if not for our [advocacy] efforts.

Policymakers in Washington tended not to know that Haitians were excluded from the H-2 visa program. If you talk to development people about migration, they tend to see it as a kind of failure; what happens when other development efforts have failed. They fail to appreciate that one third of Haiti’s GDP comes from remittances from overseas, far more than foreign aid. Migration is critical to Haiti’s economic development. It was only because we were going around having these back-room conversations in Washington that any of this happened. It was a fascinating experience because I never did anything like it before.

People were saying, “There’s an election next year, and you’re advocating a policy bringing extremely poor black people into the United States? You have a better chance selling gay marriage for terrorists.” However, we were able to educate policymakers about the situation, and they were receptive to a change in the policy.

You write that you are “thrilled” about the H-2 visa policy revisions, but do you think that the U.S. should enact additional changes to accommodate Haitian immigrants? What about appending the official definition of “refugee” to include those displaced by natural disasters?

Yes, I want to go even bigger picture. There is a big hole in U.S. law and in international law: there are no provisions for dealing with any kind of post-disaster international migration. For forced migration across borders, there’s just nothing. You have legal status under U.S. and international law as a “refugee” if you face a credible threat of violence based on your membership in a well-defined social group. So, if I had gone around Haiti before the earthquake firing a gun at people who practice voodoo, then Haitians could apply to the U.S. for refugee status. But if an earthquake comes along and kills 200,000 people, destroys all of your prospects and possibly affects you much more than a lot of armed conflict would have, then there’s nothing. U.S. law does not allow the systematic admission of even one person for that reason. That resembles the situation we had before refugee law, when all kinds of atrocities happened because we had no way of dealing with refugee situations.

Here we are in the 21st century, with natural disasters happening all the time and getting more frequent, and there’s just no mechanism for dealing with the displaced [victims]. Even getting a tiny change enacted in work visas for a country totally devastated by a worst-case-scenario disaster involved months and months going around D.C. begging for this tiny little change. Everything is ad hoc. What we really need is a legal change.

The definition of “refugee” in the U.S. wasn’t always limited to people facing violent prosecution. The definition in the original 1952 law included people fleeing natural catastrophes. That was the law of the land for 28 years, until 1980 when the U.S. changed its definition of refugee to harmonize with the UN convention, which did not include natural disasters. Natural disasters were just not on people’s minds. However, recent events have demonstrated the necessity of having a system to deal with those displaced by natural disasters.

In your recent Journal of Economic Perspectives paper, “Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?” you discuss the tremendous potential economic gains from lowering barriers to emigration. What political obstacles are preventing this from happening?

I think it comes down to ideas. No matter how many immigrants there are in the world, people think there should be fewer. The U.S. has eleven percent foreign-born right now, but a lot of anti-immigrant pressure groups feel we’re being completely overrun. The foreign-born population is 23 percent in Australia, 45 percent in Toronto, and 80 percent in the United Arab Emirates, but these places are still modern and well-functioning. None of these places are flawless, but none of the nightmare scenarios put-forth by anti-immigrant groups have come to pass.

Many Americans see country of origin as a legitimate moral determinant of who has the right to jobs in America. However, in the case of H-2 work visas, Department of Labor regulations stipulate that any job open to H-2 visa workers has to be advertised for sixty days; if any American applies for it, the employer has to either hire that person or write to the Department of Labor explaining why that individual did not qualify for the job. Furthermore, almost no Americans apply for these jobs. It comes down to a long-held set of assumptions that change slowly over time, like Americans’ evolving attitudes towards slavery.  I think we are moving in the right direction, but it will take a great deal of time.

Despite the current barriers, you have identified a rapid increase in global labor mobility in recent years. Do you foresee this trend continuing in the future? What role will U.S. policymakers play?

Yes. Lant Pritchett of the Harvard Kennedy School wrote what I think is the best book on global migration and development, Let Their People Come. He lists a number of different reasons why there has to be some accommodation of greater labor mobility. One is that for a large number of important migrant-sending areas, the wage gaps between these countries and the destination countries are increasing. For some areas, like China, the wage gap is getting smaller and smaller for physical labor, but that is not true for Haiti, West Africa, or large parts of Southeast Asia. Furthermore, demographic changes, like the population decreases in Italy and Russia are opening up new labor markets.

Other kinds of economic barriers are also falling or getting smaller. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were still huge trade barriers all around the world. Nearly seventy-five percent of those have fallen. Data shows that small increases in labor mobility lead to much greater economic gains than the elimination of all trade barriers and tariffs, and that truly is the “Trillion Dollar Bill on the Sidewalk.” In fact, studies (see Table 2 of this paper) show that further declines in trade restrictions will not lead to a dramatic economic gain. If policymakers want to grow the world economy by dropping international barriers, one of the only ways left for that to happen is through greater labor mobility.

Feature photo:  cc/United Nations Photo