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Haiti Migration
The population growth rate in Haiti's rural areas has
been
lower than the rate for urban areas, even though fertility
rates
are higher in rural areas. The main reason for this
disparity is
outmigration. People in rural areas have moved to cities,
or they
have emigrated to other countries, mostly the United
States and
the Dominican Republic. An estimated 1 million people left
Haiti
between 1957 and 1982.
Many of the emigrants in the 1950s and the 1960s were
urban
middle-class and upper-class opponents of the government
of
François Duvalier (1957-71). Throughout the 1970s,
however, an
increasing number of rural and lower-class urban Haitians
emigrated, too. In the 1980s, as many as 500,000 Haitians
were
living in the United States; there were large communities
in New
York, Miami, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Thousands
of
Haitians also illegally emigrated to the United States
through
nonimmigrant visas, while others entered the United States
without any documentation at all.
The first reports of Haitians' arriving in the United
States,
by boat and without documentation, occurred in 1972.
Between 1972
and 1981, the United States Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) reported more than 55,000 Haitian "boat
people"
arrived in Florida. The INS estimated that because as many
as
half of the arrivals escaped detection, the actual number
of boat
people may have exceeded 100,000. An unknown number of
Haitians
are reported to have died during their attempts to reach
the
United States by sea.
Though poorer than earlier immigrants, the boat people
were
often literate and skilled, and all had families who could
afford
the price of a passage to Florida. About 85 percent of
these boat
people settled in Miami.
In September 1981, the United States entered an
agreement
with Haiti to interdict Haitian boats and return
prospective
immigrants to Haiti. Under the agreement, 3,107 Haitians
had been
returned by 1984. Nevertheless, clandestine departures by
boat
continued throughout the 1980s. The Bahamas was another
destination of Haitian emigrants; an estimated 50,000
arrived
there by boat during the 1980s. The Bahamas had welcomed
Haitian
immigrants during the 1960s, but in the late 1970s, it
reversed
its position, leading to increased emigration to Florida.
Since the early twentieth century, the Dominican
Republic has
received both temporary and permanent Haitian migrants.
The
International Labour Office estimated that between 200,000
and
500,000 Haitians resided in the Dominican Republic in
1983. About
85,000 of them lived on cane plantations. In the early
1980s,
about 80 to 90 percent of the cane cutters in the
Dominican
Republic were reported to be Haitians. Through an accord
with the
Haitian government, the Dominican Republic imported
Haitian
workers to cut cane. In 1983 the Dominican Republic hired
an
estimated 19,000 workers. Evidence presented to the United
Nations (UN) Working Group on Slavery revealed that the
Dominican
Republic paid wages that were miserably low and that
working and
living conditions failed to meet standards set by the two
governments. According to some reports, Haitian cane
cutters were
unable to leave their workplaces, and they were prevented
from
learning about the terms of the contracts under which they
had
been hired.
Emigration helped moderate Haiti's population growth.
Furthermore, annual remittances from abroad, estimated to
be as
high as US$100 million, supported thousands of poor
families and
provided an important infusion of capital into the Haitian
economy
(see Balance of Payments
, ch. 8). At the same
time,
emigration resulted in a heavy loss of professional and
skilled
personnel from urban and rural areas.
Data as of December 1989
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