Haiti’s Caribbean neighbors pull back the welcome mat

May 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

PORT ANTONIO, Jamaica

Emmanuel Geurrier and 30 fellow Haitian quake survivors took to the sea last month with pretty much any port in mind.

“In Haiti, people are sleeping in the street and in the roadside, and I don’t want to stay in a country where I have to live like a dog,” he said last week, while in immigration custody in Jamaica. “I took a boat and said, ‘I go anywhere!’ Then I see Jamaica.

“Maybe I can stay.”

On Sunday, three days after speaking to The Miami Herald about the challenges of living in Haiti after the quake, Geurrier was sent home. He is one of hundreds of Haitians who have landed on Caribbean shores in the four months since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake rattled the nation, killing an estimated 300,000 and displacing some 1.3 million people.

And though nations such as Jamaica and the Bahamas initially announced compassionate gestures toward their Caribbean neighbor, the welcome mat has been yanked. Fearing a deluge of Haitian migrants, Jamaica and the Bahamas — like the United States — have renewed repatriation policies for migrants captured at sea that were in place before the quake.

Haitian migrants have not swarmed the waters as many had feared, but officials are wary that the upcoming hurricane season will flood Port-au-Prince settlements and push people to take desperate measures.

Geurrier, who had been deported from Jamaica before, landed on the country’s northeast coast April 10. His group followed another boat of 62 migrants that already had been repatriated, including a handful of escaped prisoners.

But the second group included 11 children and a pregnant woman who gave birth three days after landing, raising issues about whether the mother and her Jamaican-born infant, named Francisca, should be allowed to stay.

The group was held in custody at a Port Antonio Seventh-day Adventist Church, where policemen kept watch and local volunteers helped care for them. The Jamaican government paid the bill while locals combed the ladies’ hair, brought in food and played with the kids.

“We don’t have anything against Haitians; we’d like to help,” said Orane Bailey, senior policy director for border security at the Jamaican Ministry of National Security. “But we can’t keep this up too long. That’s the message we would like to send.”

The tab to house and feed the group grew to $2,500 a day, he said. The government spent $12,000 on medical care alone.

He noted that the first group of migrants included 16 people who had been deported from Jamaica before. The second group had nine.

The Turks and Caicos repatriated 124 people who arrived on one boat shortly after the quake. But the number of migrants there has not swelled, because Haitians who arrive there generally hail from Cap Haitien, which is in the north and was not affected by the tremors.

Within three days of the Jan. 12 quake, the U.S. Coast Guard sent 10 ships to Haiti.

So far this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, 555 Haitians have been interdicted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. Some 1,782 were interdicted last year.

On Tuesday, the Coast Guard repatriated an overloaded vessel in international waters north of Cuba that carried 105 Haitians.

The U.S. Border Patrol reports a 15 percent decline in the number of Haitians caught making land.

Since the quake, 43 Haitians have been arrested for entering the country illegally, compared with 51 last year.

U.S. Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said the number of Haitians caught at sea is up now, but down historically.

The numbers may rise more, he said, when rain during hurricane season — it starts June 1 — begins flooding survivor camps. With that threat imminent, neighbor nations are eager to send the message that any new migrants will be sent home.