World

Is There A Better Way?

December 3, 2001 / 9:47 AM EST / AP

U.S. and Cuban officials meeting for migration talks Monday discussed ways to better cooperate in efforts to halt the burgeoning practice of illegal immigrant smuggling blamed for a growing number of deaths at sea.

"We already have been working together on anti-smuggling efforts," James Carragher, the new State Department coordinator for Cuban affairs, said after talks wound up Monday afternoon.

"The United States' Department of Justice is committed to upholding the law against these despicable people who would carry out human smuggling and we will indict and seek to convict them," he said.

Neither Carragher, nor Cuban officials, provided details about U.S. suggestions for improved law enforcement efforts between the countries.

Ricardo Alarcon, head of the Cuban delegation and president of Cuba's National Assembly, told reporters after the meeting that Havana recognizes recent U.S. efforts to arrest and prosecute migrant smugglers.

But, "much more energy is needed in applying the law and making it more effective," Alarcon said of U.S. efforts to arrest smugglers who charge Cubans up to $8,000 each to bring them to the United States illegally.

Alarcon said he also reiterated Cuba's demands that the United States do away with a 1966 law he says encourages risky and illegal migration.

The law known as the Cuban Adjustment Act "violates the spirit" of 1994 and 1995 Cuba-U.S. migration accords examined during the Monday meeting, Alarcon charged.

The law says that any Cuban citizen who has been permitted to stay in the United States may apply permanent residency after being present in the country for one year.

The law does not specifically deal with the issue of how to handle Cuban citizens who emigrate to the United States illegally.

But current U.S. migration policy allows most Cubans who reach American soil by illegal means to avoid repatriation and eventually apply for U.S. residency under the act.

Most U.S.-bound Cubans picked up by U.S. Coast Guard at sea are repatriated to their homeland.

Havana blames the combined U.S. migration policies for the deaths of hundreds of Cubans at sea, including 30 who perished when their boat capsized in the Florida Straits in mid-November.

Carragher said he rejected any discussion of the U.S. law during Monday's talks, which he said designed purely to measure adherence to the migration accords.

"Cubans risk their lives in illegal passage because we have not made the migration accords as they could be," Carragher said.

"Cubans are looking to leave a situation in which they can not practice freely human rights." Carragher said Cubans also take the risk because of what he called "the continued failure of the Cuban economy to give the opportunities that a free market can."

The talks are held every six months under accords signed after a 1994 immigration crisis that saw about 30,000 Cubans take to the sea in U.S.-bound boats and rafts. Both countries afterward agreed twork toward allowing the orderly and legal migration of Cubans who want to live in the United States.