Sunday, January 22, 2006

Lighting Up Some Perfectly Good Cubans...

This frustrates liberals to no end. The Cuban immigrant dilemma. On one hand, here's a ready supply of jobless, penniless, unskilled laborers ripe for the plundering, but the hero of loons everywhere doesn't want his people coming here. If Fidel is against it must be bad, right? And how smart and loyal and trustworthy can these immigrants be if they don't see the genius of Fidel?

January 22, 2006 -- "President Bush's announcement that he plans to meet with Cuban-American leaders to discuss U.S. policy for Cuban migrants couldn't be more timely.
Bush's move follows outrage over news that the Coast Guard returned 15 Cubans who thought they'd arrived safely in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Gov. Jeb Bush was vocal in his disapproval, and then came a much-publicized hunger strike by Ramon Sanchez, president of the Cuban activist group Democracy Movement. Sanchez ended his 11-day strike Wednesday, after he was notified of the meeting.
U.S. policy is that Cuban refugees who "touch U.S. soil, bridges, piers or rocks" get to stay in America, while those intercepted at sea are returned to Castroland.

Unfortunately for the 15 who reached Old Seven Mile Bridge, its unattended state has left it eroded and disconnected from land. The Coast Guard used this to justify immediately sending the refugees back.

"Because they reached an old bridge and not a new bridge, there's a judgment they didn't reach American soil? The semantics used to return these men and women — who have risked so much to reach freedom and are now returned to an uncertain future — are an embarrassment," said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), himself a Cuban immigrant."

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