Reading Agency in the Asylum Testimonies of Haitian Refugees to the US in the Jean-Claude Duvalier Era (1972-1983)

• In Event: Migration and Human Rights

Abstract

I propose a paper adapted from my recently submitted doctoral dissertation. It examines the first Haitian refugee crisis between 1972-1983, when thousands of Haitians fled to the US due to the policies of the Jean Claude Duvalier dictatorship. I use the methodologies of transnational social and intellectual history to examine American and Haitian-American advocacy for the refugees as well as efforts by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to expel them.

My paper examines how US immigration authorities and advocates for the Haitians created parallel bureaucracies to elicit testimonies from Haitians, albeit to very different ends. US immigration officials elicited narratives from asylum seekers that attempted to show that they entered the US as economically motivated migrants, and thus were expellable. In contrast, advocates for the Haitians elicited rival affidavits from refugees. They attested that Duvalier government repression and its systemic creation of poverty caused refugees to flee Haiti, a cause which fulfilled the international legal requirements for asylum. My paper examines how Haitian asylum seekers negotiated the rival bureaucracies of asylum advocacy and the INS. I argue, that despite the deep inequality of power that separated refugees from their US and Haitian-American intermediaries, many asylum seekers carved out a limited agency for themselves. Over the course of their detention, they gained fluency in the repertoires of human rights language and asylum law. They crafted powerful narratives in which they expressed their ideas about justice in tandem with their condemnation of US immigration policy and the Duvalier regime.

Author

• Allen Kim