Women, men, young people and children crowd at the doors of the immigration offices in Port-au-Prince, with the aim of obtaining a passport that will allow them to leave Haiti and escape an insecurity and crisis that permeates everything.
Since the launch this year of the humanitarian program of the US Government that grants migratory permits to citizens of Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba, around 2,000 Haitians go daily to those dependencies in search of a passport to be able to undertake this trip. To united states.
Many of them choose to sleep outside the offices to be among the first to enter when the doors open.
"Last night my baby and I slept on the floor"tells EFE a woman in the vicinity of one of these headquarters a few kilometers from the National Palace, in the center of Port-au-Prince.
This is the day-to-day in practically all the immigration centers in Port-au-Prince and provincial cities, where thousands of people are involved in an environment of confusion, conflict, regret, frustration and also rejection due to the inability to the authorities to deliver identity documents to its population.
get out at all costs
Leaving the country is the only option for many Haitians given the increase in violence from bloody armed gangs.
"With increasing insecurity, the survival instinct comes first, the reason I want to leave. If it weren’t for this situation, I would never have wanted to leave like this, especially to the United States."comments to EFE Jeanne Philippe, who lives on Route de Frères, a few kilometers from the US embassy.
Before, he wanted to go to Canada to continue studying, but his plans changed as a result of the humanitarian program in the United States, where his brothers are.
Public and private faculties and institutions complain of having lost highly trained personnel in the last five years.
"Haiti is not giving its sons and daughters the opportunity to develop their potential. Today the future of young people is practically out because Haiti is not a land of opportunities"tells EFE the economist Enomy Germain.
And adds: "Life is threatened in Haiti. It is not a good environment for leadership and talent development. In a situation like this, on an individual level, there is no choice but to leave at all costs.".
For Hancy Pierre, professor at the State University of Haiti, Haitian emigration "is part of a global movement of populations in distress due to the repercussions of neoliberal policies that do not suit their needs".
This expert denounces that this "It is a town with little access to emigration" and, in this regard, emphasizes the "administrative obstacles and violations of the right to identity by the Civil Registry".
Haitian emigration, a double-edged sword
Another point to highlight is the bidirectionality that exists between migration and the economy. A double-edged sword because, in the opinion of the economist Enomy Germain, talent is being lost (nearly 85% of executives live abroad), but at the same time many Haitians subsist thanks to the money that comes from abroad.
This expert points out that Haiti’s largest source of income is not exports, but private transfers from the diaspora. Last year the country received some 4,000 million dollars in remittances.
At the micro level, hundreds of thousands of families depend solely on these money transfers, "so -he adds- the Haitian executives who are abroad are financing the economy".
Warns that Haiti "he’s running out of talent, out of substance" and a country that loses its cadres in this way faces obstacles to long-term development.
"It is a deadly loss for the Haitian economy because the people who should be in charge of development are not available in the country"considers.
And what is worse, Germain warns, the prospects for the return of migration are not clear either, which puts that future into question.
