Income levels of Mariel migrants lower than earlier Cuban exiles - Sociologist

Posted on Thursday, 05.23.13



Sociologist: Income levels of Mariel migrants lower than earlier Cuban

exiles

By Juan O. Tamayo

jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com



Cubans who arrived in the United States during and after the Mariel

boatlift have lower income levels than older migrants from the island

and now rank close to other Latin American arrivals, according to an

expert on the Cuban Diaspora.



"From the elite of the Hispanic migration … (Cubans) have become just

another Latin American group," Alejandro Portes said Thursday during a

conference hosted by the Cuba Research Institute at Florida

International University.



The three-day conference, the ninth sponsored by the CRI and usually

held every two years, drew about 250 participants to discuss Cuba

migration and how it affects issues such as music, literature and U.S.

policy.



Portes said the initial waves of Cubans who came to the United States

after Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 arrived with generally good

business skills and educations and were welcomed by the U.S. government

and people.



They became the highly successful migrants sometimes called the golden

exile, he said, because they helped each other and could receive

so-called "character loans" — bank loans issued without collateral and

based solely on the recipient's reputation.



Such loans are a thing of the past, said Portes, a sociologist at

Princeton and the University of Miami who has written extensively about

the waves of Cuban migrations before and after the 1980 Mariel boatlift.



Reports that criminals and other "undesirables" were among the 125,000

Cubans who arrived on the boatlift also led to these arrivals losing the

support of the U.S. government, the U.S. population and even earlier

arrivals, Portes said.



Although Mariel and later arrivals are more entrepreneurial than

migrants from most other nations — greater Miami has more Hispanic

businesses than Los Angeles — they have not been as successful as the

earlier Cuban arrivals, he said.



They arrived with few real business skills and perhaps weak overall

educations, Portes noted, because the island's educational system has

deteriorated significantly in recent decades, especially after the

Soviet Union collapsed and ended its massive subsidies.



Enterprises established by the more recent arrivals also may lack

sufficient capital, the sociologist said, because financing is tighter

now and these migrants tend to send more cash and other types of

assistance to their families and friends on the island.



Recent arrivals tend to have income levels far below those of earlier

Cuban migrants, Portes said. In 1999, the average income for post-Mariel

arrivals was $27,000, he added, about the same as other Latin American

migrants.



And while the children of early migrants were more likely to attend

private schools, the children of the later arrivals were more likely to

attend public schools at a time when the quality of U.S. public

education has been dropping.



As young adults, those children also were more likely to have lower

incomes and school graduation rates, higher number of children and

higher rates of incarceration, he said. Among the children of Mariel and

post-Mariel arrivals, one in 10 has been incarcerated, Portes added.



The more recent Cuban arrivals, he said, "are not statistically very

different from other Latin American migrants.



Portes also noted that the Cuban government's decision to ease

restrictions on travel abroad as of Jan. 14 has changed its migration

system, from "a one-way escape" designed to lower domestic opposition,

toward "more of a two-way street."



"Intentionally or not," he added, the new system means the Cuban

government is treating the more recent migrants as "a reliable financial

resource" that can send cash to the island and reduce the political

influence of the older exiles.



The Cuban Research Institute conference continues Friday with a 2 p.m.

keynote panel on the effects of Raúl Castro's economic reforms chaired

by economists Carmelo Mesa Lago and Jorge Perez Lopez. A dozen more

panels are scheduled Saturday.



http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/23/3413577/sociologist-income-levels-of-mariel.html