Clinton Goal: Persuade Haitians to Stay Home : Policy: The incoming President is said to favor establishing a Caribbean-area camp for refugees.

With more than 1,200 small boats reported ready to put to sea from Haiti, President-elect Bill Clinton and his foreign policy team sought to cobble together a policy Tuesday that would persuade Haitians to stay home instead of trying to reach the United States.

“Obviously, it’s something we have to do relatively soon,” communications director George Stephanopoulos said at a briefing. He added that Clinton almost certainly would make an announcement before he takes office.

Haiti was high on the agenda when Clinton met Tuesday with his top foreign policy strategists in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. Among those present were Secretary of State-designate Warren Christopher, Secretary of Defense-designate Les Aspin, National Security Adviser-designate Anthony Lake; Lake’s deputy, Samuel (Sandy) Berger, and foreign policy advisers Nancy Soderberg and Leon Fuerth.

But Clinton must choose from an unattractive list of options, most of which either will return Haitians to the impoverished and repressive island or touch off a mass migration of refugees that will swamp American facilities designated to handle them.

“The new Administration doesn’t have any more options than the past one,” an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service said.

The choices essentially lie between allowing anyone who wants to try to reach the United States to do so and establishing a center outside the United States to adjudicate claims for asylum, the official said. Under international law, persons fleeing political persecution are entitled to refugee status, while persons trying to escape poverty are not.

The official said that Clinton appears to be leaning toward establishment of a camp, possibly supervised by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, somewhere in the Caribbean to provide temporary housing for Haitians picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard. But this option requires finding a third country willing to host such a facility.

A second option, he said, is to create a safe haven in Haiti under U.N. supervision where asylum seekers could be interviewed. That approach has two main drawbacks: There is no certainty that the Haitian government would permit it and there is a danger that it would become a Somali-style feeding station rather than a refugee processing facility.

The only other option, he said, is for the United States to allow Haitians to try to reach this country and determine later whether they are eligible to stay. If that’s the choice, he added, the new Administration must decide whether it wants to station a picket line of Coast Guard cutters near Haiti to pick up potential refugees or let them take their chances in the open sea.

But Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a staunch backer of Haitian rights, sought to widen Clinton’s alternatives. He called on the President-elect to signal his support for Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president of Haiti who was ousted by a military coup in September, 1991, after only nine months in office. Aristide’s overthrow touched off the flood of Haitian refugees, most of whom are political supporters of the radical Roman Catholic priest.

“Clinton should meet with Aristide,” Rangel said in a telephone interview. “Aristide should be invited to the inauguration to show that the Clinton Administration stands for democracy in this hemisphere.”

But as Clinton’s Jan. 20 inauguration approaches, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of Haitians ready to test the new administration’s policy by risking their lives in often unseaworthy sailboats.

A Bush Administration official said that a Coast Guard reconnaissance flight over Haiti in mid-November counted 610 boats ready for use and 107 more under construction. On Dec. 10, the Coast Guard found 1,244 ready for sea and 231 under construction.

“In some cases they are building fishing boats but many people are clearly planning to set sail in anticipation that the U.S. policy is going to change,” the official said.

As if to prove the point, 352 more Haitians arrived in Miami Tuesday, stowed away on a 75-foot wooden freighter. Their arrival worsened the dilemma faced by U.S. immigration officials who seem to be running out of space to house the illegal migrants.

Wayne Joy, acting deputy district director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami, said that eight pregnant women and nine minors among the latest arrivals would be paroled into the community; the remaining refugees are to be detained, possibly in jails outside Florida.

The Krome Detention Center near Miami is filled to capacity with 237 illegal migrants, Joy said, 163 of whom are Haitians. Of the Haitians, all but three or four are taking part in a hunger strike that began Thursday to protest what refugee advocates say is a discriminatory immigration policy.

Times staff writer Kempster reported from Washington, and special correspondent Clary from Miami. Times staff writer Douglas Jehl in Little Rock also contributed to this article.