In particular. all too often our foreign assistance money goes toward military spending and other means of reenforcing the respressive machines and control of elites who helped create and maintain the conditions of inequality and denial of human rights. We must come to realize the intimate and inextricable connections between economics and politics. Haitian refugees. indeed all refugees. are both economic and political refugees. Many are individually persecuted by the infamous political police. the Tonton Macoutes. But all Haitians are affected by a corrupt. violent regime that maintains and magnifies economic inequalities by political means. Our foreign policy toward underdevelopment and refugees from the Third World must recognize this connection and positively link economic development to the universal extension of human rights. I am firmly convinced that a foreign policy toward the Caribbean. and the Third World in general. that ties human rights to economic development is in the best longterm strategic and economic interests of the United States and to world peace in general. We need to immediately address the humanitarian needs of the Haitian refugees in the United States and treat them with the same profound concern we have so freely extended to the Indochinese and other refugee groups. But our concern cannot stop there. We must develop a positive and effective foreign policy toward the Caribbean that will strike at the joint roots of economic underdevelopment and political repression. one that will extend political and economic rights universally.
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refugee refugees