Mireille came here to Delaware in search of a better life, but the promise of stability now seems hazier than ever. Through those long overnight shifts, the same thought keeps playing in her mind: “I didn’t leave anything back home in coming here, and then to go back there with nothing in my hands?”
Mireille arrived in the United States in April 2023, three months after the Biden administration implemented a two-year “humanitarian parole” for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans fleeing political violence and natural disasters to find work in the U.S.—up to 30,000 people per month. The program, formally known as the Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, or CHNV, is “divine intervention” for Haitians with no other options, said Emanie Dorival, a nurse practitioner who works with the Haitian community in Delaware. “There is no way all these Haitians and the other countries who are part of that program would have been allowed to come.” People who worked as lawyers, doctors, nurses, and accountants in Haiti now find themselves on the production line, she said. “They’re doing whatever to survive. It’s about survival.”
At Mireille’s church in a small town a few miles from the capital of Dover, about three-quarters of congregants are recent arrivals. Haitians were the largest group of immigrants within the program, with about 214,000 moving to the United States and filling jobs in industries that have struggled to retain workforces, especially after Covid killed and disabled so many workers. The program also revitalized dying towns, helping immigrants alongside citizens. Ensuring asylum wasn’t just the right thing to do in terms of morality or international law; it also helped rescue the economy, said Ediberto Román, law professor and director of citizenship and immigration initiatives at Florida International University. The CHNV program has been one of the Biden administration’s quieter but more striking success stories.
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Publish date : 2024-10-17 23:03:00
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Author : theamericannews
Publish date : 2024-10-22 03:04:19
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