There are three ways to approach the mess in Haiti, its failure as a society, which was best symbolized by the 15,000 Haitian refugees, now down to zero, that for a week or so crowded in an underpass near Del Rio, Texas. What was to be done about them and what to do with Haiti? The first proposal, propounded at the time by journalists, local politicians and the American diplomat who resigned over the issue, is to do the humane thing, regardless of what the law says, and grant asylum to the Haitians because there is no life to be found in Haiti given its earthquake, its political disruption and its failure to make a living for its people. After all, we allow any Cubans who get to the United States to remain there because of the remnants of a Cold War that ended 35 years ago. Haiti has about the same population as Cuba, about 11 million, even if Haiti is one third the size of Cuba and Haiti is the most densely concentrated population in the Western Hemisphere. Why not let in the ones who can manage to get to America, the failure of Haiti to thrive being sufficient reason? The Monroe Doctrine has been taken to mean that the United States takes responsibility for its hemisphere so as to preclude foreign control of the area, and so the United States cannot pawn off Haiti to France just because of their related language and history. Moreover, the United States has regularly intruded into Haiti. The U. S. Marines occupied the nation during the Twenties so as to pacify the nation and Bill Clinton both restored a legitimate Presidency to Haiti and then took up a major initiative to reconstruct the nation economically after one of its regular earthquakes. Why not now, after another earthquake and another period of political unrest? What was done before can be done again, never mind the debate about immigration policies having to do with any number of other peoples trying to make it into the United States. Think of immigration as a blessing rather than a problem. It shows that people want to come to the United States so as to achieve better lives. Would one prefer people not to want to get to the United States, legally or not? The pressure of immigration shows the U.S. is thriving. As one wag put it, take two billion dollars from Biden’s 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation package, and then Haiti could be reconstructed into being a respectable nation.
An alternative view is that it is a bad idea to engage in nation building. It works only if there is a brief disruption in nations that are otherwise fully developed on their own. It worked after World War II when Germany and Japan and Western Europe were able to have financial aid and other assistance so that those nations could recover from their damages, the peoples intact, as to societies and their cultures, only needing fine tuning to become democratic. That was not so with Arab countries or other undeveloped countries such as Afghanistan. We could not make over what was never whole. The same thing happened with Haiti and we have evidence to show the case to be so. The Clinton initiative was to build a textile factory in Haiti after the earthquake of 2010 so as to build an economic structure that could sustain itself rather than require handouts every time there was a natural or political disaster. A factory was close enough to and so could easily supply Miami with its products and the economy would prosper once it had been created, and this would stabilize politics and social structure. Textiles were a good basis for modernizing an economy. It had worked in the American South at the beginning of the twentieth Century and in China as it modernized after the country went Communist. But the factory in Haiti was never completed, the ostensible reason that those who promised funds didn’t deliver though that was because the Haitian system was so rife with corruption that nothing productive was being done despite millions of dollars invested by the Clintons in their major post Bill Clinton Presidency. Surely, he was not half hearted in wanting the project to work. It would have been a spectacular post-Presidential legacy, better than Jimmy Carter’s Habitats for Humanity. Nudging or levering modernization into Haiti didn’t work and so is not likely to work today just a decade after what Clinton tried.
The third possibility is that pursued by the Biden Administration. It claims that it is applying immigration law evenhandedly regardless of the nations from which immigrants fled rather than favoring or especially discouraging Haitian nationals. People are let in because of health care, fear of torture, or because they have to be relocated for administrative reasons. Otherwise, they are deported. Haitians flown back to Haiti are given initial assistance, though it is not clear how long that lasts. But there is no obligation to take in Haitians because the country they have lived in is so depelated of jobs and services and organization that it is pointless to live there, which is either treated as a reason for asylum in the United States or a reason not to be allowed in the United States because they have lesser chance of making a go at life in the United States because of their origins. But what seems even handed according to the Biden Administration seems either uncaring or oblivious to the facts of nationality to others. Majorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security, emphasizes instead that his agencies will act humanely to the erstwhile immigrants even if they will not be allowed into the United States. But that misses the point, proceduralism becoming an end in itself, while the government also claiming that there is a need for an overall immigration law overhaul that Republicans have blocked for years.
Stand back for a moment from the point of view of a sociologist and ask about what are the whys and wherefores of the wealth of nations, with Haiti as a particular case in point. Max Weber’s view, which is over a hundred years old and still seems sound, is that religion explains why nations prosper. The Protestant world first developed capitalism so as to infiltrate the entire society, while Catholic Europe came next and Catholic Latin America still lags behind, Eastern Orthodox Christianity lagging still behind, though industrialization made inroads all across Europe and the English speaking peoples during the Nineteenth Century. China and Japan caught up only because of forced openings to those traditional countries because of the United States and Western nations. Haiti was exceptionally backward in that its slave culture was infiltrated with Voodoo, which was a pagan religion, even if, like some African countries, there was a veneer of Catholicism on top of it. Islam remains underdeveloped as of yet despite its immense wealth from oil. It does not as yet have a university system or a way to profitably employ women except to make work positions. Haiti is close to the bottom of the stack, and religion points out as more important than cultural backwardness as the result of climate, something that seems to ring true for equatorial Africa and South America though not for equatorial India, because Haiti shares with it the Island of Hispaniola with the Dominican republic, which is better off than Haiti however laggard because of its Catholicism, the Dominican republic having developed a bit of a resort area economy which Haiti can no longer claim when Bill and Hillary honeymooned there. Religion is persistent whatever the political upheavals and so politics is not the cause of Haiti’s failures as a nation. It is deeper than that.
Whatever may be the way religion impacts on social structure, what is or can be done in the present Haitian situation, assuming that there is some responsibility of advanced societies to deal with particularly undeveloped ones? One insight to bring to bear is that a nation cannot skip social stages and so Soviet russia became totalitarian rather than just more industrialized because it pressed too hard to go to leaps and bounds without having ever developed a significant middle class, an entrepreneurial class, much less a people that had undergone the Enlightenment and so forcing industrialism onto a peasant population. Slower stages take better, and that suggests that the Clinton initiative was not a bad idea as a way to introduce a time tested way to move from peasantry to industrialism. Moreover, what might be called pocket revolutions also don’t work. These are revolutions that achieve a transfer of power from one regime to another without changing the social order, which is what happens when there is a true revolution, Neal Smelser restricting the term “revolution” to those larger changes while considering riots or social movements as having more limited goals in that riots are aimed at redistributing wealth and social movements to change social norms rather than basic values, as when the Civil Rights Movement was accomplished through relying on basic principles of equality without trying to undermine those principles-- pr at least that is the way that Smelser puts it, putting aside that getting rid of Jim Crow was a revolution in social structure even though it did not require a violent revolution.
Outside intervention by the United States into Haiti is less a revolution than it is disaster relief such as happens with hurricanes and earthquakes, which is just the concept applied so often to the intervention in Haiti. The 1915 invasion was considered something more to transform the social structure of the society. Disaster relief, however, is something temporary that requires temporary measures, Clinton clearly intends to do something more than the temporary to solve Haiti’s long standing problems. The earthquake was an excuse to do something long lasting.
There are insights in the process of disaster relief that can assist Haiti for the long run. Here are two principles of disaster relief that are applicable to Haiti in the long run. First off, it is necessary to create a route from the non-disastrous area to the disaster area. When San Francisco in 1906 experienced an earthquake and then a fire, shipments of food and other supplies were shipped across San Francisco Bay from Oakland and long freight trains were sent from as far as Los Angeles. After Hurricane Katrina, General Russell Honore sent his national guard troops into New Orleans, though broadcasters claimed that it was no big deal, no hacking through the wilderness, since their portable trucks had done it days before. Well, the waterway between Haiti and Florida was clear and not too far and so that is another reason that the Clinton initiative made sense: It gave a way to connect a disaster area with a non-disaster area. Second, there are always secondary impacts of disasters. The San Francisco fire was the result of outdoor cooking while natural gas pipes were broken and leaking gas. The deaths in New Orleans hospitals died because there was no air conditioning for the elderly in New Orleans hospitals. A secondary impact of the disasters in Haiti is the additional concentration of rich Haitians into their enclaves, ever more indifferent to the plight of the poor, which also happened in Europe during and after the Black Plague of the Fourteenth Century. Repeated disasters therefore do not result in a desire to alleviate suffering more but less. The future for Haiti remains bleak, whatever the aid packages the United States sends to them.