Charity Begins 700 Miles Away

More US taxpayer money being spent to prevent Haitians from escaping Haiti:

Every day, a United States Air Force cargo plane specially equipped with radio transmitters flies for five hours over the devastated country, broadcasting news and a recorded message from Raymond Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington.

“Listen, don’t rush on boats to leave the country,” Mr. Joseph says in Creole, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon. “If you do that, we’ll all have even worse problems. Because, I’ll be honest with you: If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. And they will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.”

Homeland Security and Defense Department officials say they are taking a hard line to avert a mass exodus from the island that could lead to deaths at sea or a refugee crisis in South Florida. Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is about 700 miles from Miami…

The State Department has also been denying many seriously injured people in Port-au-Prince visas to be transferred to Miami for surgery and treatment, said Dr. William O’Neill, the dean of the Miller School of Medicine at the University of Miami, which has erected a field hospital near the airport there.

“It’s beyond insane,” Dr. O’Neill said Saturday, having just returned to Miami from Haiti. “It’s bureaucracy at its worse.”

Notice that the problem with “a refugee crisis in South Florida” isn’t the “refugee crisis” part—Haiti is already a nationwide refugee crisis. The problem is the “in South Florida” part. We Americans like our charity to be clean and abstract. Texting $10 to the Red Cross is convenient and lets us feel good about ourselves. Best of all, it’s a form of charity that keeps the Haitian people themselves far away, so that we can go back to ignoring them and letting them starve when we get bored with the Good Samaritan act.