Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 11, 1994 TAG: 9412140047
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The problem for the United States - despite our railing against the brutal dictators who had taken over the country and thwarted its fledgling democracy -was refugees. Florida was awash with them, and thousands more were risking their lives in rickety boats to get to America, no matter that they weren't wanted, or didn't fit the criteria for special refugee status.
What could the United States do to stem the influx? At one extreme, it could welcome - with jobs, housing and other help - every refugee whose boat reached American shores while urging those who had not yet left not to do so. The voyage is too treacherous, we might have said; stick it out and we'll bring pressure on the junta to restore democracy. We'll take care of those who already are here, or on the way, but the rest of you stay put; you'll be better off.
Such a course might underscore America's reputation as a humane country with great sympathy for the underdog, but it would not stem the flow of refugees.
At the other extreme, we could send war planes to strafe the refugee boats at sea, rescuing just enough of the absconders to take back and spread the word of our new no-nonsense policy. The result would be irreparable damage to our human-rights reputation, but it would end the refugee problem.
The history of the Bush and Clinton Haiti policies was an effort to find some point between the extremes that would leave our self-image intact and keep the stream of refugees to a minimum.
The story of the welfare debate can be told in similar terms: as a search for policies adequate to help those in need of help, but not so generous as to increase their numbers.
As with Haiti, we've abandoned the extremes. No one is so radical as to propose keeping the poor in middle-class comfort at taxpayer expense, while pleading with them to become self-sufficient. The closest anybody comes to wanting to strafe the poor is the notion broached by Charles Murray (before ``The Bell Curve'' eliminated him from the debate) that we simply eliminate welfare. We would agree to take care of the children (in orphanage-like institutions, if necessary) but not of their improvident mothers.
In the Haiti analogy, it would be like rescuing the children while leaving the hapless mothers to sink or swim on their own.
Would it reduce the number of women - of teen-age girls - who have babies that they cannot take care of? No doubt, and in that sense it could be said to work. The difficulty, though, is not merely the retrograde character of the proposal but also its cost. The ``24-hour pre-schools,'' as Murray described the orphanages he had in mind, would cost a lot of money - for buildings, skilled teachers, trained aides, health screening. Welfare would seem a bargain in comparison. And since money is one of the engines driving welfare reform, the orphanages won't happen.
In the cases of both the refugees and the dependent poor, the debate is largely over how to change our treatment of those already in a desperate situation so as to discourage others from entering it. Not surprisingly, the answers we come up with involve either absolute abandonment or some means of making the treatment worse than the condition. We will be harsh, we say, only to help, though what we are really discussing is, at bottom, less about them than about us: our inconvenience, our sensibilities, our economics and our politics.
And what might we discuss instead? We might talk about ways to make sure our people have the wherewithal for self-sufficiency in the first place. That means paying attention to the homes they grow up in, the schools they attend, the communities they live in, the jobs they are able to obtain. It is easier - and despite appearances, cheaper - to raise children properly in the first place than to redeem them after they become threats to the society.
That's a hard lesson to learn, which is why we keep trying to solve crime by changing the criminal-justice system and social dysfunction by changing the welfare system.
There is no Haitian refugee problem today - not because we found the perfectly calibrated method of dealing with refugees but because we found a way to give potential refugees something they hadn't had before: hope. Isn't that something to think about in welfare reform?
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by CNB