Let Cubans In, and Watch Castro Rot : The invasion metaphor only serves anti-immigration forces.

After weeks of begging Fidel Castro not to let his people go, the Clinton Administration has gotten its way. The Cuban government has agreed to stop balseros from taking to the seas in search of freedom and hope.

But more than 30,000 Cuban refugees remain behind barbed wire at Guantanamo Bay. And there is no guarantee that the rafters will stop coming. Cubans have been fleeing the island for 30 years, with or without Castro’s permission.

The bankruptcy of the Administration’s policy and of the ideologies that drive it are increasingly apparent. The Administration has built at Guantanamo the perfect monument to the linked ideas of welfare-statism and anti-immigrant nationalism. It has seized people with family support networks in the United States, people with tremendous courage and initiative and--based on the record of earlier Cuban refugees--a high likelihood of self-reliance and low chance of welfare dependency. And it has imprisoned them in a mini welfare state, where their basic physical needs are met while they are kept alienated from the Americans who foot the bill.

The toll Guantanamo takes on lives is obvious; the cost in money rarely reported. One Pentagon estimate pegs the start-up expense at $100 million, plus $20 million a month (not including the cost of the Haitian refuge on the base). If President Clinton truly wants to “end welfare as we know it,” he could start by releasing these would-be workers into the U.S. economy, where they could create wealth instead of living off taxpayers.

As Father Bryan O. Walsh, executive director of Miami’s Catholic Community Service and a 35-year veteran of refugee work, told The Times: “These are the risk-takers, willing to sacrifice today . . . to have a better tomorrow. They make the best possible additions to a free-enterprise system.”

The open society depicted in Walsh’s vision of free enterprise is anathema to welfare-statists. And it is equally foreign to the immigration foes who have relentlessly repeated for at least a decade that the free movement of individuals constitutes a threat to “national sovereignty,” an “invasion.”

But there are perverse consequences in treating families fleeing tyranny as though they were armies spreading tyranny. It warps our sense of America--of what a free country represents--and our understanding of the crucial difference between individuals and governments. And it warps our foreign policy, conjuring up military threats and strategic interests where none exist.

We have begun to take the invasion metaphor literally, to reason that when threatened with “invasion,” America must repel the invader, by force if necessary. So the Clinton Administration declares it a national imperative to invade Haiti, not simply to “restore democracy” but to stop immigration, to halt the “invasion” of refugees in fishing boats.

Before we expend lives to repel a metaphorical invasion, however, we should examine the relevant precedents--large-scale migrations that deserve more careful consideration than the Clinton Administration has given them.

Of the 125,000 Cubans who fled Castro in 1980, something like 5,000--a mere 4% of the total--were prisoners and mental patients Castro wanted to get rid of. Of those, the U.S. government sought to repatriate 1,500, slightly more than 1% of the total. Yet this tiny fraction is constantly cited as evidence that Mariel was a disaster.

It was a disaster primarily for Bill Clinton, whose gubernatorial loss in 1980 was blamed in part on violence at a refugee camp in Arkansas. South Florida absorbed most of the Mariel refugees, with some adjustment pains but without long-term trauma. Indeed, research by Princeton economist David Card suggests that the influx didn’t even drive down wages or raise unemployment among existing Miami residents; rather, the Marielistas’ work increased the area’s overall wealth.

Human beings are valuable, even in crass monetary terms; they produce as well as consume. Both welfare-statists and anti-immigration nationalists deny that value. And that denial has led Clinton to believe that getting Castro to build a Berlin Wall will hasten the end of Cuban communism.

History suggests otherwise. Five years ago, tens of thousands of East German refugees poured into West Germany by way of newly opened routes through Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland. But the exodus did not ease the pressure for reform in East Germany. It did not “reward” Erich Honecker. It brought down the communist state.

That is a history lesson even Bill Clinton is old enough to remember.