MIAMI, (Reuters) – All Ana Soto had to do to gain entry to the United States at the Texas-Mexico border in 2008 was show her Cuban identity card and birth certificate.
Soto has since brought her husband from Cuba, reunited with her parents in Miami and got an accounting job – building a dream life thanks to one of the most generous U.S. immigration laws: the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
“I had no future in Cuba. My life, and my entire family’s life has changed for the better thanks to the Adjustment Act,” said Soto, 24.
Those who follow in Soto’s footsteps may not be so fortunate. As the U.S. Congress takes up immigration reform, the special status of Cuban emigres is being called into question by critics who say the CAA is a costly and anachronistic Cold War relic that should be abolished.
The issue has gained urgency after a relaxing of travel restrictions by both Cuba and the United States that has led to a dramatic increase in the number of Cubans traveling between the two countries. Soto herself has returned to Cuba a dozen times, on the last occasion to visit her dying grandmother.
Last month Cuba ended its practice of requiring an exit permit to leave the island, and said all Cubans could obtain a passport, potentially increasing the exodus.
Even traditional defenders of the CAA in the nation’s large Cuban American community, concentrated mostly in South Florida, say the law is out-dated and may need adjusting.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be able to avoid, as part of any comprehensive approach to immigration, a conversation about the Cuban Adjustment Act,” Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, told reporters last month.
Rubio, one of eight senators pushing for bipartisan immigration reform, said the CAA was intended to protect refugees fleeing an oppressive regime but an increasing number of Cuban exiles were traveling to and from Cuba on family vacations and business trips, undermining the justification for the act.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify it to my colleagues,” said Rubio.
Cuban immigrants are just a sliver of the roughly one million foreign-born nationals who become legal permanent U.S. residents each year and their fate might seem small compared to the 11 million estimated to be in the United States illegally. But as a touchstone of American freedom, they play an outsized role in the nation’s politics.
As such, the CAA is unlikely to be thrown out entirely, analysts say, but it could well be tightened to limit eligibility to genuine victims of political persecution in Cuba.
“There is going to be a discussion and there are going to be changes, but how far they will go nobody knows,” said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “There is no reason now for Cubans to have preference in the immigration line,” he added. The reform could also mark the end of the controversial ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy, coined after the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis, that allows entry to undocumented Cubans who reach U.S. soil (‘dry foot’) either by home-made rafts or smuggler ‘go-fast’ boats, as well as thousands who show up each year at the Mexico border. Others intercepted at sea (‘wet foot’) are repatriated.
