The wait began long before daybreak: By sunrise, more than 100 people had shown up. At 8 a.m., the line stretched down past the end of the building and snaked across the parking lot. Tickets to Hamilton? The new Star Wars movie?
No. The prize today was a coveted spot in English classes through Miami Dade College’s REVEST program, or Refugee/Entrant Vocational Education Services Program. George Delacruz brought his wife to sign up at 4:30 a.m. “Everybody knows, you know, ‘Hey, you have to be early. If not, you’re out!’”
The free English and vocational classes MDC offers here have become an important stop for new arrivals from Cuba. As the number of migrants has grown with fears that Cubans may soon lose their special immigration status, so has demand for REVEST. The latest data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows more than 35,000 asylum-seekers from Cuba in the six months between October 2015 and April 2016, already nearly as many as the 43,159 that came in all of fiscal year 2015.
Diego Castro, who oversees the Hialeah location, says he has come to expect that he’ll have to turn people away after filling 600 spots for new students at the start of each semester. “It’s getting more crowded every year. But it’s—the funding is never enough to meet the demand.”
The virtually all-Cuban line included doctors, dentists, and lawyers, all hoping to learn enough English to pick up their work again here in the U. S. “We’re going to give out 100 appointments for the morning, and 100 for the afternoon,” a security guard told the crowd when the doors opened at 8. The registration period lasts three days, but within a couple of hours, nearly three-quarters of the spots were already spoken for.
