Document Analysis Essay

In the first source titled The Council of the City of New York, council members Williams, Codd, Foster, Friedlander, Gerena-Valentine, Messinger, Olmedo, and Wallace spoke about the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Department of State and how they should release all Haitian refugees that were being held in many different facilities throughout America. In this document is relaid to readers that there were 22,000 Haitian refugees that were held in prison in eleven different centers all across American soil. They had entered the United States illegally and were not deemed as citizens, for they had left rather quickly due to political repression and economic deprivation. Out of these a mere fifty-three were held in Brooklyn and were not given equal rights by the establishment, these prisoners were supposed to be released, but they were not because of other cases that came into the mix.

In the second document, January 2nd Coalition for the Defense of Haitian Refugees, it told readers that between the United States and Puerto Rico combined there were 3,000 Haitian refugees in just a year and a half. From July of 1981, the Reagan administration had captured and imprisoned Haitians that were fleeing from terrible economic struggles and repression, as mentioned in the first document. The American public felt that if the United States government continued to take the side and support repressive and corrupt governments then it is also responsible for the amount of Haitians coming to America to get away from their bad government. The January 2nd Coalition wanted to emphasize putting the Haitian refugees in concentration camps before being deported in a case he called “immigration emergency.”

These documents are similar because they both clearly state that the United States practically held the Haitian refugees as prisoners when they only came here to get out of a type of imprisonment within their own corrupt government.Both documents relay how the prisoners, or at least some of them, were supposed to be released but were not and that the American public did not agree with what the government was doing in relation to the Haitian refugees. A difference that I found to be particularly interesting was the Puerto Rico was also involved in the imprisonment of the Haitian refugees. The article that was in regard to the January 2nd Coalition stated that the Puerto Ricans and the Americans had a sum of 3,000 Haitian refugees in concentration camps alone. That is a large number, but nothing compared to what America had in detention centers all across the country.

Unfortunately, I did not learn anything about my research topic in particular, but I did find these two documents to be interesting all the same. Though not interesting enough to change my research paper topic, I still enjoyed learning about a part of the United States that I had not heard of before, though it is upsetting that after we were so against the Jews being put into camps such as the ones we were creating, that we would do the exact same besides from killing them, unless we did that too which I would not be surprised about.

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