A man towed in by a shrimp boat is later turned back at sea

In May 1973 an American shrimp trawler called the Sea Cat came across a Haitian sailing vessel, the Ella, off the coast of South Florida. The people aboard were worn down and low on food and asked for help, and the trawler towed them in. They were detained, their asylum claims were refused, and they became plaintiffs in the lawsuits that shook the immigration service for the rest of the decade. One of them was Nelson Thomas. Through the 1970s he picked oranges and apples along the seasonal route between Florida and Virginia and fathered four children who were United States citizens. In April 1980 word reached him that his mother's house in Port-au-Prince had been set on fire. He bought a Haitian passport at the consulate in Miami and flew home. On arrival he was stripped of everything he owned and jailed. About two years later he left by sea again. A cutter stopped him, an officer interviewed him briefly, and he was returned to Port-au-Prince.

Food production for local consumption fell in absolute terms through the 1970s while the population grew. The result was famine in 1977. A special correspondent of Le Monde reported that between March and June of that year about three thousand people died in the Northwest region alone, and that of the 245,000 people living there 170,000 were counted as in need. Agriculture by then covered somewhere between a third and a half of the country's food requirements. The annual rise in the price of food between 1970 and 1976 had been 16.5 per cent. Haiti exported sugar and imported refined sugar. It exported meat through a monopoly that paid producers eleven cents a kilo and imported powdered milk, condensed milk, animal fat, butter and tinned meat. It had fishing grounds all around it and imported dried salted fish. Rice left the country in a profitable export trade while the home market went short.

On a Wednesday afternoon in the autumn of 1979 a man called Jean Baptiste came into the general medical clinic at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. Two weeks earlier he had left the wards with tuberculosis confirmed by biopsy and drugs that were known to work against it. He was emaciated, could barely walk, fell to one side when he did, and the left side of his face had dropped. The senior emergency room resident argued that he needed time to heal. A week later he returned unable to walk at all, held up by friends, and was admitted only under threat of disciplinary action. A scan showed several large lesions in his brain, read at the time as pockets of tubercular pus. He died within a fortnight. His physicians concluded that he had come in too late carrying too much disease, which was a reasonable conclusion in 1979. Nothing in the training of anyone on that ward described what had actually killed him.

Between 1979 and 1981 as many as seventy thousand Haitians entered Florida by boat. Many of the vessels were small open sailing craft, the kanot used for fishing. Richman notes that during the 1970s a higher share of the Caribbean population emigrated than that of any other region of the world. The traffic stopped almost at once when Washington acted. Coast Guard cutters were stationed in the Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti to intercept the boats and burn them, to weigh claims for political asylum and to send back everyone found ineligible. Virtually every claim was rejected. Arrivals fell to a dribble through 1982 and did not resume with any regularity for nine years. The people who had landed found work almost nowhere except migratory farm labour, settling in Belle Glade, Immokalee and Fort Pierce to cut sugar cane and pack vegetables, and moving each summer with labour contractors to the farms of the middle Atlantic coast.