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- ARTICLE_POSTED_BY: Haiti NGOs
- ARTICLE_POSTED_ON: Jan 14, 2015
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By Tatiana Wah
April 22, 2013The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Overview
By Tatiana Wah
April 22, 2013The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
Over the last five decades, Haiti has lost to the developed and developing world a significant amount of its already meager manpower resources, largely in the form of international migration. This has led to a significant pool of skilled human capital residing mostly in the Dominican Republic, the United States, and Canada as diaspora communities. Some estimates show that as much as 70 percent of Haiti’s skilled human resources are in the diaspora. Meanwhile, it is increasingly argued that unless developing nations such as Haiti improve their skilled and scientific infrastructures and nurture the appropriate brainpower for the various aspects of the development process, they may never advance beyond their current low socio-economic status. Faced with persistent underdevelopment problems and with language and cultural barriers, international aid agencies, development scholars, and practitioners are increasingly and loudly calling for diaspora engagement programs.
The processes required to construct successful diaspora engagement strategies for Haiti’s development, however, are not well understood and consequently merit serious attention. Programs make implicit and explicit assumptions about diaspora members that do not apply to the general understanding of how émigrés build or rebuild their worlds. Programs fail to place strategies within the larger framework of any national spatial-economic development plan or its implementation. Current engagement strategies treat nationalistic appeals and diaspora consciousness as sufficient to entice members of the diaspora to return or at least to make indirect contributions to their homeland. Improving diaspora engagement strategies for Haiti’s development should begin with a better understanding of the Haitian diaspora population—why they left in the first place, the activities they undertake, their competencies and resources, and how they can effectively contribute to their homeland.
Why They Left
The Haitian population had been largely stationary before the 1960s, save for labor migration to neighboring Caribbean islands. Haitian mass migration to the more developed countries, and especially to the United States, remained insignificant, primarily because of racial tensions and segregation. Less than 2,000 Haitians legally immigrated to the United States from 1900 to 1950. By the late 1950s to early 1960s, however, many from the upper and middle classes began to flee the dictatorial regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, thus constituting the first wave of Haitian mass migration. This first wave brought Haitians to the United States, to Europe (mostly France), to French-speaking Canada, and to Francophone Africa.
Massacres, confiscation of property, and persecution of members of the educated and professional class propelled their outflow. Those who were believed to be communists were also targeted. My half-Chinese father was jailed more than a dozen times because the Duvalier regime believed that he would agitate the proletariat and peasant farmers. The dictator’s goal of building a new black aristocracy in Haitian society under the noiriste ideology (the black power or ‘black is beautiful’ movement) called for the extinction of the existing upper and educated classes, and the nationalization of their property and enterprises. The noiriste ideology was also the basis for Duvalier’s promotion of the emigration of Haitian professionals and technicians to the newly independent countries of Francophone Africa in the 1960s. By so doing, Duvalier did effectively reduce potential political opposition, but this period also marked the beginning of Haiti’s brain and capacity drain.