Host, foster, adopt – whatever it takes to help Haiti’s orphans

In 1939, the transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Germany with 937 Jewish refugees on board. They hoped their desperate circumstances would allow them to be approved for entry into the U.S.
Expedited entry was refused. A State Department telegram informed them they must “await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.” The waiting list was already several years long.

The St. Louis returned to Europe with its passengers. When Germany conquered Western Europe, 532 of those St. Louis passengers were captured and 254 died in the Holocaust. A similar disaster of much greater proportion may be about to happen.
Haiti’s earthquake killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people and produced as many as 700,000 orphans.

American families are eager to adopt these children, but Haiti requires an adoptive couple to be married at least 10 years; they cannot already have a biological child; and both adoptive parents must be at least 19 years older than the child. The Haitian adoption process routinely take three years.

Rather than ease those pre-earthquake restrictions, the Haitian government has put a ban on any orphans leaving the country, even those who have nearly completed the difficult adoption process.
Clearly, though, something must be done. Haiti did not have the resources to care for the approximately 380,000 orphaned children it had before the earthquake, and it certainly cannot now take care of a million orphans.

When the earthquake hit and 14 year-old Daphne Joseph escaped her collapsed home, she took a jitney and then a motorcycle-for-hire to get to the market where her mother was a beauty product vendor. “Mama,” she kept repeating to herself. “Mama, I’m coming.”

At the market, she saw a pile of building rubble and “broken people,” as she described it to reporter Deborah Sontag. Daphne watched as the lifeless body of her mother, her only parent, was pulled off the rubble pile, put into a wheelbarrow and hauled away. “I wanted to kill myself,” Daphne said.

Daphne would qualify for an F-1 student visa, if the U.S. would choose to grant her one, after a family is found who would accept and support her. (Under federal law, F-1 students must pay tuition to attend public high school.)

A five-month-old baby boy was pulled from a building’s ruins four days after the earthquake. No one knows who dropped him off at an Israeli medical unit outside of Port-au-Prince. He is recovering from his successful treatment, but now, asks Dr. Assa Amit, “What will we do with him when we are finished?”

Ordinarily, U.S. immigration laws would grant that little boy “humanitarian parole,” but, says the New York Times, “the U.S. military on Wednesday stopped flying critical quake patients to U.S. hospitals for treatment, in a confused dispute over where they should be hospitalized and who should pay the costs.”

Volunteer Dr. Jennifer Furn said, “We are sending wounded children back on to the streets of Port-au-Prince with no plan even for how they will be fed.”

Unlike 1939, this time we should adjust our immigration laws rather than turn away the injured and orphaned from our shores.

Many, many families in the U.S. are willing to host, foster or adopt these children — whatever it will take — if they are just given the chance to do so.

Sharman practices law in Culpeper. His column appears each Tuesday.