The Senate elected not to fund that supplemental appropriation and expressed in its declination to do so the need for the United Statos to determine what its longterm policy was going to be relative to the detainees at Guantanamo. So we have had the opportunity as a Senate to speak on this issue. and what we said to the administration was: Come up with a policy of how to deal with this situation before we commit an additional $50 million on top of the $1 million a day we are spending in order to maintain the population which is currently at Guantanamo. Another part of this very unfortunate situation was the fact that there is great concern in the United States about the increasing number of immigrants. What seemed to be a strategy that would try to maximize the positives and minimize what are inherently going to be negatives in this situation was a policy that said let us take some of those 20.000 visas a year we are committed to offer through the interest section in Havana. and let us shift those to Guantanamo and assign those to those persons who. on a casebycase basis. can meet the standards of entry to the United States. That has seemed to me for a number of months to be a rational policy. one not without risk or problems. but better than a set of unhappy other alternatives that face the United States. I am pleased the administration did not wait until we had a riot at Guantanamo in order to act. that the administration essentially took the direction which this Senate had given. to state what our longterm policy was going to be visavis Guantanamo. That policy will be that over the next 3 years. we will shift visas from the interest section in Havana to Guantanamo. to begin the process of depopulating Guantanamo. Those who meet our standards will receive one of the visas for entry to the United States. Those who do not meet our standards will be sent back to Cuba. The major concern about that policy was the concern that is referred to as remagnetizing Guantanamo.
Keywords matched
immigrants visas