Economic Development

There is no justice without a functioning judicial system and Haiti's is broken.  Prisons are sorely over-crowded in part due to 80% of inmates being held for years with no trial.  In addition, activists report a distrubing increase in illegal preventive detentions.  Judges are few, overwhelmed, and often threatened.  Haiti remains a fragile democracy and will remain so without justice and the rule of law.  If the judicial system improves, then we will know that Haiti is, at last, changing for better.  The full article by AP journalists Evens Sanon and Danica Coto is linked and follows below. 

The cessation of Temporary Protected Status, which in reality often lasts many years, would result in the deportation of 200,000 Haitians, Nicaraguans, El Salvador, and Sudanese who together have more than 200,000 children born in the United States.  Deportations would separate families and create unneccesary suffering.  It would also have negative economic consequences for companies like Butterball Tukey who depend upon an immigrant workforce.  This is hard, dirty, and difficult work that would be hard to fill otherwise.   Policies can be be sound from both a humanitarian and economic perspective  at the same time - deporting hard-working people and separating them from their families when their labor is very much needed would be neither.  

At the insistence of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Haitian government had agreed to cut government subsidies on fuel which would have caused prices to increase by over half.  Life is expensive enough in Haiti due to a lack of economic growth and dependency on imports.  To reduce subsidies would have made life even costly when many struggle just to get by.  The situation was very tense but has since calmed.  Still, the IMF has yet again hurt Haiti by failing to promote policies that are pro-poor.  The full article by Time journalist Billy Perrigo follows.