AGAINST THE TIDE : American Bureaucrats Are Telling Haitian Refugees to Fear Not. Easy for Them to Say.

Twenty-five years ago, it would have seemed like a dream, or a nightmare. Today, it’s just another shard of governmental reality. I refer to the part of the vast United States bureaucracy that now has as its sole function the job of figuring out whether or not a person is paranoid.

You think I’m making this up? You always think that, don’t you, you and your influential pals in--sorry, power of suggestion. I am not making this up. The first elected president of Haiti was ousted by a military coup in September. Since then, the Haitians who fled their land in tiny boats have been sequestered at our Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. Recently, the Supreme Court authorized the forced repatriation of those Haitians, agreeing with the government’s position that they were not true refugees. According to the official definition, you are not a refugee unless you have a “well-founded fear of persecution.” It’s somebody’s job in the government to examine people’s fear of persecution to see how well-founded it is.

One refugee who was interviewed by National Public Radio had actively campaigned for the ousted president’s election. After the coup, there were widespread reports of renewed activity by the old Haitian goon squad, the Tontons Macoutes. This guy put two and two together and hustled his hiney onto some raggedy boat, hoping for Miami, detained in Cuba.

So this special office, in the State Department probably, took two and two apart. Our officials said Tontons Macoutes attacks were happening only in the first few days after the coup, so this guy really had nothing to worry about. In our government’s opinion, he was just being paranoid, and he was subsequently deposited at the Port-au-Prince bus station with $15 in Red Cross good-luck money and an official U.S. certification of his irrational state.

What a shame this service didn’t come along sooner. How convenient it would have been for all those people who used to go to Disneyland in an overly self-medicated state and couldn’t quite figure out if the Matterhorn was in fact talking to them or if they were just paranoid. All they would have had to do is borrow some change, call the government and blurt out a few facts (this office needs refreshingly small amounts of evidence to draw its conclusions). Then they could have relaxed in the teacups, secure in the knowledge that Uncle Sam said their fear of persecution was ill-founded, relieved to know it would probably wear off before the fireworks.

In all the fuss about a national health-care crisis, it’s amazing that nobody has pointed out the enormous potential this office has for reducing the cost of so-called psychotherapy. If the guys in the State Department can pierce the veil of paranoia with such dispatch, they could probably make equally quick work of schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder.

Come to think of it, we Americans are giving this valuable diagnostic service to these would-be refugees for free, as if it were just a little packet of hotel shampoo. Why the low-balling? The health-care system can use every dollar it can get, so why aren’t we charging these people for their analyses at, let’s say, average Beverly Hills Freudian rates? True, it might be hard, given the Haitian economy, for the paranoids we send back there to earn enough money to pay the bill. But, thanks to the way the Bush Administration is jimmying--or should I say Georging?--the books, income due is to be counted as money in the bank for purposes of calculating the deficit, so let’s stick it to the islanders. They already think they’re being persecuted, so a little actual exploitation won’t hurt ‘em.

But what if one of the Haitians isn’t so easy to figure out? What if, instead of fearing some bogymen back home, this fellow fears being picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard, kept in the next best thing to boot camp for months on end and then dragged back home--all because he didn’t have the foresight to be a Cuban, who gets to waltz into this country for no other reason than he’s tired of watching Castro on TV? Such a complex dynamic would call for more in-depth probing than bureaucrats, even in the State Department, can provide. Maybe our policy should be humanized just a touch. Maybe the Haitians should be allowed one free call to Dr. David Viscott.