Cuban Privilege from the Deportation Machine: An Opportunity for Immigration Change
"Cubans Americans are an example of what is possible when we spare people from the deportation machine."
Warning: I am not commenting on the legal aspects of immigration, nor is this an in-depth analysis on cuban nationality, politics, or immigration as a whole. This is my anthropological analysis of a book.
Any analysis of history in the United States has to reckon with the ugly legacy of US immigration history, the purposeful exclusions and deportation of, typically innocent, groups of people being discriminated on the basis of culture/race/etc. Yet, there is one group, who has been privileged so uniquely against the backdrop of mass deportations and anti-immigration campaigns, Cubans. The privileging of Cubans in relation to immigration and pathways to citizenship, further illustrates the inequality within the US immigration system, and also highlights the US’s ability to offer aid and entitlements to immigrant groups, that ultimately allow them to flourish in the United States.
Cuban Privilege: The Making of Immigrant Inequality in America, written by Dr. Susan Eckstein, is a book that details the Cuban migration from Cuba to the United States, but also the unique privileges that were offered to Cuban immigrants that have not been awarded to any other immigration group in US history. These privileges involved specific entitlement programs (such as SSI upon arrival), presidential and congressional exceptions to immigration restrictions, and altering the definition of refugees to include Cubans in exile (and allow them finical refugee benefits). The goal of Eckstein is not to say that Cubans are naturally privileged, but that the specific politics of the Cold War, along with the creation of Cuban Americans as a policy base, has created a unique situation that has allowed Cubans unique pathways to enter the United States. All of these privileges are occurring while many other immigrants groups, ranging from Mexicans to Haitians, face serious threats of deportation or coercion that alienates any pathways for them to become American citizens.
What was the United States' intention with benefitting Cubans with these immigration pathways? Eckstein illustrates how the preferencing of Cuban nationals to immigrate to America began as a Cold War effort to destabilize communist influence post Cuban revolutions. During the Cuban Revolution, the majority of exiles coming to the US were those of whom owned property and were of high social status, while those of low status gained access to healthcare, schooling, jobs, and more (Eckstein, 1). This revolutionary event did not start migration from Cuba to the US, as the close geography of the Florida and Cuba (90 miles) allowed for constant back and forth, but this event did begin the US’ specific interest in Cubans as a means of destabilizing a nearby communist country. As a means of soft power foreign policy, President Eisenhower accepted Cubans leaving post revolution, in hopes of zapping Cuba of its human capital, and through “hard power” by creating a generation of Cubans who could eventually topple the anti-American Castro regime (Eckstein, 23).
The Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA), developed and pushed by President Johnson, allowed for Cubans who had already entered the country a new pathway to permanent citizenship, it also aided in the further immigration of Cubans, allowing them privileges on the basis that they were “refugees” (Eckstein, 54-55). The refugee status was adapted to favor Cubans, as the United States ratified the previous legal definition to remove the previous 1951 cutoff date, allowing Cubans to offically qualify for refugee status (Eckstein, 3). This refugee status is “imagined”, as argued by Eckstein, due to the fact that many of these Cubans who began entering the United States during the Cuban revolution had their lifestyles endangered, but not their lives (Eckstein, 9). Yet the United States was quick to offer them refugee status, with the CAA furthering their imagined refugee status, imposing no cap on Cuban immigration, and not requiring Cubans to submit proof of fleeing persecution, something that was and is still customary for other immigrant groups (Eckstein, 56). Immigration has always been specifically racialized, previously so explicitly to favor western europeans, that each nation of origin had pre-determined quotas per year. This means, if you were from a non-western european country, the US could deny your immigration application on the basis that it had already accepted the maxium number of people from your country of origin. Yet Cuba had negoticated a minimum number of immigrants allowed per year, a stark difference to previous immigration policies.
Ecksteins book follows 12 different U.S. presidents and their administrations impact on cuban immigration and privileging, spanning from Eisenhower to Trump. Each chapter begins and ends with an overall summary of her arguements. Just about every president continued the existing precendent of cuban privilging, and any attempts at opposition was quickly discarded in favor of re-election campigns. For example, the custody dispute of the cuban child Elián González, and the strong reaction the Miami cuban community had when the child was sent to live with his father in Cuba, ma have contributed to the eventual loss of clinton’s former VP Al Gore in the Presidental race of 2000, where he lost Flordia by a margin of 500 votes.
The Cold War entitlements for Cubans extend past the Cold War, with the preferential treatment of Cubans extending into the 21st century, with President Obama ridding of many of the presidential favors, in an effort to legitimize relations with Cuba. Obama made these changes in his last full week in office, when he was no longer running for re-election, because of the backlash he would receive otherwise in treating “Cuban migrants the same way [the United States] treats migrants from other countries” (Eckstein, 250). Eckstein’s analysis is that the early entitlements cubans recieved allowed for class mobility, and thus their development as a voting block (in the swing state of Florida), and the development of a Political Action Committees—modeled after AIPAC— that furthered this privileging of Cubans (Eckstein, 161). The overall result of this privileging has created an extremely large voter base of Cubans, along with high ranking officials within the US government, that will vote in favor of Cuban-American interests, spanning Democratic and Republican Party lines (Eckstein, 319).
To further illustrate this specific privileging of Cubans in relation to United States’ immigration policies, one must further analyze the way the other immigrant groups have been treated in relation to immigration, deportation, and citizenship. Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine focuses on the ugly reality of immigration policy and expulsion in the United States. This book focuses on both the formal deportations, and coercive methods such as voluntary departure or self deportation, with these later methods using immense fear and lack of due process, to allow the United States to further control its “borders” and expel immigrants.
Legal deportations are the ones individuals are most familiar with, usually involving legal preceding and criminal cases seen on the news or social media. Since a 1889 US Supreme Court decision of Chae Chan Ping v. U.S. (aka the Chinese Exclusion Case), the US federal government has “plenary power” over anyone it may admit, exclude, or expel while limiting non-citizens’ constitutional rights (Goodman, 21). This created a precedent of treating immigrants as non-citizens, even extending to the idea of undesirable immigrants, of which Congress created and extended a list of deportable actions such as: political beliefs, sexual activities, health statuses, and an in-ability to assimilate (Goodman 26-27).
The most secretive and insidious forms of deportation that the United States engages in is self deportation or “voluntary” departure, the first is when an immigrant (or a community) feels unsafe due to social scapegoating, and the last is where an immigrant is given a “choice” of returning to their country of origin to avoid detention, lengthy legal battles, and potentially being barred from re-entering the United States. This was used in the despicable deportation event known as Operation Wetback, occurring in the 1950s, that resulted in the expulsion of millions of Mexican immigrants to Mexico (Goodman, 38). Further examples of racial scapegoating can be found throughout American history in nativist movements, such as the Anti-Chinese Expulsion Campaigns of the mid to late 1800s, and include exerted efforts to make immigrants return to their country of origin through fearing for their lives (Goodman, 11). Through a mixture of fear campaigns, raids, scare tactics, resulting in voluntary departures outnumbering formal deportations nearly nine to one between 1927 and 1964 (Goodman, 38). This self deportation allowed the government to create mass deportation under a veneer of legibility and avoid costly legal channels.
Analyzing the extent that the United States has taken to exclude, coerce, and deport a wide range of immigrant groups, versus the pathways to citizenship offered to Cubans, the differences are stark. Despite a popular understanding of privilege as something to reduce, or get rid of, I am of the opinion that privilege is something we should aspire to. Highlighting the privileges of Cubans when immigrating to the US country is not to ignore their struggle for a better life, but to showcase that many other immigrant groups have not been allowed the same opportunities to become citizens. What Eckstein’s book does so well is detail how the privileging of Cuban immigrants has sometimes been at the expense of other groups, with the preface illustrating this with real world examples of boats, both including Haitians and Cubans, being detained by the US Coast guard. All the Haitians were detained, and the majority of them deported, back to Haiti, while the Cubans were admitted by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. This clear bias, of one island in the Caribbean to another, is what inspired the author to write this book. This privileging that is outlined in this book, can also be seen as reforms to the US immigration system, a machine that is deeply broken, and yet has been changed and altered to benefit immigrant groups.
Cubans Americans are an example of what is possible when we spare people from the deportation machine. The ability for incoming Cuban immigrants to have a clear, and sometimes expedited, pathway to legal residency and citizenship throughout history has contributed to their upward social mobility and social integration within the United states. As Eckstein details, “The Cuban experience demonstrates how immigrants benefit from legal status, and how broader society benefits, in turn”, a case could be made that similar entitlements could be awarded to other immigrant groups, and that therefore they could also succeed as well as Cuban-Americans have (Eckstein, 341).
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