The Cuban privileged amnesty buzz is being brought back to the forefront with regard to the Central American children who are detained in detention centers in both Nogales, Arizona and in Texas.
Arizona Chicano Activist, formerly with Voto Latino in the State of Arizona says:
If Cuban Adults qualify as refugees, then most certainly these Central American Children can qualify. Interesting how Politicians have been happy to receive Cuban 'refugees' accept them into their communities, groom them for political careers, and even present them to the country as their minority poster boys...yet when a group of children without homes, many without parents, arrive in desperation from our neighboring country the predominant conversation on the topic is about how to slam the door or how to fast to drop them off in the jungle!
I can't help but to be reminded of the 'wet foot dry foot' policy enjoyed by Cubans for over four decades now. Could the dire circumstances of these Central American countries be compared to the circumstances precipitating the Cuban Adjustment Act 1966? May we suggest that the Cuban situation no longer presents the exigency that merits such an accommodation as automatic citizenship? May we further suggest that perhaps now there may be another country in the world where the current political economic and social conditions present a more clear and present danger to the people who live there, lets say...Honduras (commonly known as the MOST VIOLENT COUNTRY IN THE WORLD), whose children are arriving at our doorstep carrying nothing with them but the hope of life? Cuban parents use the US as a sort of boarding school where they send their children to be groomed as politicians (or hip hop moguls). Hondurans send their kids to the US to escape torture and death. Perhaps its time to raise the bridge to freedom we've extended to Cuba for the last 48 years and give another country some love.
This same message has been in question for some time in the southwestern part of the United States -- home of a high Chicano / Mexican-American population.
Texas State Rep. Rene Oliveira told Valley Central News:
State Representative Rene Oliveira said Thursday that 90,000 unaccompanied, undocumented children mainly from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, will cross the U.S. - Mexico border illegally, by September.
The vast majority, he added, are expected to be between the ages of 5 and 14.
"Anybody who doesn't blame it on a failed - on the failure of our federal government to deal with immigration reform, is foolish," Oliveira said.
The democratic state representative compares this wave of mass illegal immigration to the exodus of Cubans in the 1980’s.
