OPINION
El Salvador is once again the deadliest place in the world.
Data released this week show the small but gang-plagued Central American nation logged an astonishing 104 murders per 100,000 people last year – more than 20 times the U.S. homicide rate.
So if you’re a Salvadoran, what could possibly add insult to that injury?
How about watching as thousands of Cuban migrants get airlifted into your country en route to a nice big welcome in the U.S.? And knowing that red carpet comes courtesy of a U.S. rule – known as "wet foot-dry foot" – that gives Cubans automatic entry if they make it to dry American soil.
RELATED: The Cuba Illusion Has Vanished - And Now The Embargo Should Too
Under an arrangement made by Central American governments, some 8,000 Cubans languishing on the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border will soon be flown to El Salvador. Then they’ll get bused to Mexico and continue their journey to America, where they can enter and become legal residents after just one year – a privilege only Cuban migrants enjoy.
Cubans have been moving through Central America to the U.S. in record numbers recently. But these 8,000 Cubans got stuck in Costa Rica in November because Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega suddenly refused to let them come across his country.
Why? Because the communist government in Havana, which counts Ortega among its buddies, wanted to create a stir. Specifically, it hoped to draw attention to the inordinately special treatment Cubans get under U.S. immigration law compared to folks from other countries.
Like El Salvador.
The plight of Central Americans makes the free pass for Cuban migrants seem especially unfair - and the upcoming airlift through Central America feel more than a tad insensitive and hypocritical.
If you live in El Salvador, all you’re probably thinking about right now is getting out of El Salvador – in many cases, the same way a Syrian thinks of escaping Syria. That’s because maras, savage drug and extortion gangs, control whole districts of El Salvador today.
The number of Salvadorans fleeing the violence and heading for the U.S. last year is thought to have doubled to as many as 50,000.
At the same time, however, their chances of making it to the U.S. have shrunk considerably.
After a massive wave of Central American migrants showed up on America’s border in 2014, including some 60,000 unaccompanied children, Washington asked Mexico to start intercepting them. So last year the number of Central Americans detained and deported by Mexican authorities doubled.
Even if they do make it to the U.S., undocumented Central Americans face a higher likelihood now of getting booted back out. Last weekend the Obama administration itself began deporting them on a larger scale.
All of which makes the free pass for Cuban migrants – and the U.S. law behind it, the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act – seem especially unfair. It also makes the upcoming airlift through Central America feel more than a tad insensitive and hypocritical.
CRIMINAL RULE
Granted, authorities in Costa Rica say the 8,000 Cuban migrants currently stranded there will have to pay about $500 each for the plane and bus fare out. And yes, many Cubans still have valid reasons for seeking refuge in the U.S. since human rights in Cuba remain dismal and the island's economy is dreadful.
But if you’ve been in recent years to Central America’s impoverished northern triangle – El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – you’ve seen a pretty urgent impetus for exodus there as well. Cubans do live under repressive communist rule, but too many Central Americans live under homicidal criminal rule.
That doesn’t mean the U.S. should extend Adjustment Act treatment to Central Americans or any other immigrant group. But it does mean the Adjustment Act is an aberrant Cold-War relic – and we should start treating Cubans as we treat any other immigrant group.
That's especially true as we keep hearing reports of Cuban migrants abusing their fast-track status by collecting lavish U.S. welfare benefits and then returning to live in Cuba. It's a big reason a bill was recently introduced in Congress to repeal the Adjustment Act.
Cubans are leaving their island in droves largely because they fear legislation like that may pass now that the U.S. and Cuba are normalizing relations.
In the meantime, wouldn't it be more honest if we simply flew those 8,000 Cubans stranded in Costa Rica directly to Miami, which is where most if not all of them are headed anyway?
Washington can’t do that, of course, because it would spur thousands more Cubans to think all they have to do is show up in Costa Rica and wait for the next charter flight to MIA.
But as long as the Adjustment Act is in place, those Cubans can keep expecting to get ushered out of jams like the one Ortega created in November.
And then ushered through countries like El Salvador, where the increasingly common mode of transportation out isn't a plane or bus. It's a coffin.
