12504: Durban on Diaspora Database (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

In a recent post, Hyppolite Pierre suggests that the Haitian
government should...

    rely heavily on the Diaspora through better organizing
    of this tremendous and probably best resources that
    Haiti has, to get Haiti moving in the right direction
    towards development.

Good idea, but I seriously doubt that the Haitian Government has
a good database of Haitian-Americans and Haitian-Canadians.  A
project which I have long favored is to develop such a database
through use of those immigration forms collected at the airport.

God knows what is done with them now, but how about if the
immigration officers were trained check the U.S. (or Canadian)
addresses to make sure they were legible and complete, then ask
(verbally) the incoming passenger if this specific info was
accurate.

Then, two reasonably competent data input operators would type
in all the data in a large database.  Two of the data fields
would be (1) date of file was created and (2) last revision
data, so you would be able to sort by date (obviously the most
recent data would be the most accurate).  Plunking in some 1200
names and addresses every day for all of the incoming flights,
the Haitian Government would very soon start to have some
meaningful data.

I can see all kinds of possibilities for mass mailings:
selling the list to various local hotels, carefully-crafted
fund-raising appeals, invitations to return for special events,
etc. etc.  etc.  Oh, and eventually political candidates could
even "buy" the lists if they wanted to send out poop on their
candidacies or fund-raising appeals for their parties.
(Obviously this latter would open the doors to potential abuse
by whatever party happened to be in power, but anyway...).

How to overcome the traditional Haitian reluctance to trust Big
Brother?  Make it a contest.  Every year 10 free round trip
tickets will be randomly selected from Haitian Americans who
have correctly filled out their immigration card... addresses
must be correct so the free ticket coupon will be received.

The Ministry of Tourism could oversee this "Diaspora Project"
and maintain the database, working from an office provided by
the Airport Administration.

Lance Durban

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