#1809: Durban responds to Morse on Haiti's Friends (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From: Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com>

Re. Richard Morse's suggests that the U.S., Canada, France
and Venezuela each accept 200,000 Haitian immigrants.   How
would these folks be chosen?  Understandably the receiving
countries would want to take the "best and the brightest",
and where does this leave Haiti and those who don't make
the cut?

Even today, I rather suspect that the people who take the
boat are the ones whom Haiti can least afford to lose. 
That is, the ones with initative, a burning desire to get
ahead, and a willingness to work hard and take risks.  This
is somewhat counter to popular wisdom that portrays boat
people as totally impoverished, down-trodden folks at the
absolute bottom of the economic heap.  

In the early '80s working with a U.N financed housing co-op
on Delmas 4, we were somewhat distressed to find that the
local community leaders... the very people we were counting
on to run the co-op.. were the first to either move to
better neighborhoods or take a boat to Miami.  

Lance Durban 

  
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