Haitian Emigration in the Early Twentieth Century

Haitian Emigration In The Early Twentieth Century Glenn Perusek University of Chicago Standard migration theories see receiving countries as the dynamic agent which pull migrants to them. These theories, while useful for explaining many cases, appear inadequate for the case of labor migration from Haiti to Cuba and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century. This article examines this history and offers an alternative theoretical framework for explaining this migration flow. It is argued that the prime cause of migration from Haiti is factors in the sending country. Haiti has a long history as a country with a strong pattern of emigration. This article seeks to present the case of Haitian emigration to Cuba and the Dominican Republic during the first three decades of this century, and to suggest the central elements of a comprehensive explanation of these population movements. Examination of this history provides a useful case against which standard views of migration can be measured. Currently accepted approaches to the causes of migration focus on the rationality of individual migrants. People move to find jobs, or to find better jobs. They make a rational calculation of their interest in staying as opposed to leaving. When the balance tips toward leaving, they go (Petersen, 1977). This approach is stated in different ways by different authors. 4 IMR Volume XVIII, No.1 HAITIAN EMIGRATION 5 According to Roseman, If a high comparative place utility is put upon the present job of the household head, and upon the climate and other local environmental conditions, then the household is likely to remain... If the household puts a higher comparative place utility upon environmental conditions, a better job, or hope for a better job, in another general area, it may decide to move. (Roseman, 1971:589) Schwartz (1971:193) states simply, "we expect people to migrate from low earning locations into high earning locations". He sees human migration as a deliberate act, wherein the migrant attempts to increase his "lifetime utility". For Eichenbaum (1975), who constructs a "matrix of human movement" migrants are precisely those people who are free to make a calculation about both place of origin and of destination. People who are absolutely constrained by their environment at the place of origin are either refugees or slaves, not migrants at all. Lee's (1966) well-known theory of migration asserts that there are four factors associated with migration: 1) Factors associated with place of origin. 2) Factors associated with place of destination. 3) Intervening obstacles. 4) Personal factors. This theory allows for the fact that migrants have better information about their home country than any possible destination, and that intervening obstacles, like distance tend to discourage movement. In this theory migrants make a rational calculation, but it must be overwhelmingly in favor of leaving for movement to occur as there is a certain amount of inertia which must be overcome. This "rational actor" approach underlies even the Wallersteinian analysis of the world labor market by Petras (1981). Her argument is that workers seek the best wages and standard of living. "By migrating to sites where prior contests over the labor-capital balance have already been won by labor, workers are able to take advantage of those gains which have been institutionalized into conditions of the local labor market and into the general social structure". All of these approaches share common features: first, migrants are rational calculators, even though their rationality may be bounded, and second, factors in both the sending and the receiving countries affect their decision to move. In the language of migration theory, there' are 'push' factors in the sending country and 'pull' factors in the receiving country which determine migration. 6 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW The underlying assumption to these approaches is that, for potential migrants, there is some reckoning between conditions in the place of origin and that of destination. If there is a great disparity between the two, migration will increase. If conditions are not much different, the level of migration will be lower. As a result it is predicted that migration will increase during times of economic expansion. This is because economic expansion is uneven, causing relatively more growth in advanced areas than the backward ones. The greater disparities in turn cause greater migration levels. Economic downturns, though, will inhibit .uigration. "During depressions... a leveling of opportunities occurs and sheer familiarity with the place of residence militates against moving to places where positive factors no longer so heavily outweigh those at home" (Lee, 1966:53). The bias in these approaches is that, between push and pull factors, it is pull factors, those associated with the receiving country, which dominate. "The active agent seems to be the evolution of the developed country and the forces emanating from it" (Piore, 1979:19). Haitian emigration to Cuba and the Dominican Republic will be examined in light of the theoretical approach outlined above. It will be argued that the focus on migrants as rational economic actors is too narrow and that, in the case of Haiti, it would be better to situate migration within the broader economic, social and political context of the Caribbean. In the Haitian case it appears that the reckoning between push and pull factors does not occur. For instance, the standard approaches would predict that a drop in, the demand for labor in receiving countries, constituting a leveling of conditions between sending and receiving countries, would result in a decrease in migration. It will be demonstrated that once established great changes in the demand for labor in receiving countries have little or no effect on migration patterns from Haiti. Thus an alternative explanation must be found. This article presents Haiti as a classic push case - factors in receiving countries do not determine whether there will be migrants from Haiti. For the migration flows to Cuba and the Dominican Republic it appears that receiving countries do playa role in initiating migration flows. But changes in labor demand in the receiving countries thereafter appear to have little effect in reducing flows. The disparity between Haitian conditions and those in potential receiving countries is so great at all times that changes, even drastic ones, in receiving countries are not reflected in changes in the flow of migrants. Rather, it is Haiti's position as the most backward country in the Western Hemisphere that leads to immutable outflow from the country. The vast majority of the population in Haiti lives always on the brink, with incomes at or even below the subsistence level. A small change in prices on the international market, or in weather conditions, or variations in the level of repression from the current regime can easily trigger exodus. The reason changes in labor HAITIAN EMIGRATION 7 demand in receiving countries play little or no part in determining the level of migration from Haiti - once migration flows are established - stems from the fact that the situation for most Haitians at home is not 'normal'. This situation - absolute poverty - is the fundamental cause of migration from Haiti. In addition, the argument that labor demand in receiving countries leads to migration fails to take into account the fact that labor demand is not the extent of 'conditions in receiving countries'. There are also 'collective goods' from which migrants cannot be excluded, such as certain services and conditions. In the most recent migrations of boat people to the United States, for example labor demand is an insufficient conception of 'conditions in the receiving country'. Even if the migrant is imprisoned upon landing in the U. S. he or she may be better off than remaining in Haiti. This is not to argue that only surface modifications of the 'rational actor, push-pull' explanation are needed. As Petersen (1958:263) has argued, "when emigration has been set as a social pattern, it is no longer relevant to inquire concerning individual motivations". Of course, individual migrants make a calculation of whether to migrate or not. However, to focus on this calculation is to fail to take into account the important social, political and economic factors which determine broad patterns of migration. THE LABOR MIGRATIONS TO CUBA AND THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, EARLY20THCENTURY Haiti gained independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of the first and only successful slave revolt in history. Although what was to become Haiti was the most valuable colony in the Western Hemisphere in the eighteenth century, economic prosperity did not accompany independence. During the nineteenth century the economy was able to just keep pace with the growth of the population. This is indicated, for example, by the figures for exports per capita. When measured in constant 1914 prices, the exports per capita stagnated at just over $6.00 until the 1890s, however, prices for coffee and logwood, Haiti's two main export products, dropped dramatically. Simultaneously, the absolute quantity of coffee exported dropped. By 1910-1914the value of exports per capita had fallen by more than 25 percent compared to the early 1890s. This represented a significant slashing of incomes for the Haitian peasantry, so that by the turn of the century Haiti was primed to begin exporting labor. Apparently some hesitant attempts to employ Haitians in nascent Cuban 8 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW HAITI, EXPORTS PER TABLE 1 CAPITA, IN 1910-1914 PRICES Average Exports (million dollars) Population (millions) Exports Per Capita 1821-25 3.596 .593 $6.06 1838-42 4. 775 .731 6.53 1859-62 5. 739 .935 6. 14 1888-92 8.208 1. 355 6.06 1910-14 8.217 1. 778 4.62 Year Source: Rotberg, p. 97. enterprises took place at the turn of the century. There is only indirect evidence, of this, however. For instance, this note appeared in the Cuban Financier and Havana Advertiser on August 4, 1900. Recently at the demand of the press in Santiago, (Major) Tasker H. Bliss asked officials there to stop the importation by local planters and mining companies of contract labor from Haiti, Jamaica and Turks Island, whence had come over a thousand Negroes since January, 1900. (Thomas, 1971:431) It was only with the development of the sugar industry - mainly by American capital - that the possibility for large scale importation of Haitian labor into Cuba opened up. In 1900 more than 80 percent of Cuba was "unoccupied, fertile and absurdly cheap" (Jenks, 1928:129). In 1900 a syndicate headed by Andrew Preston, president of United Fruit, bought 174-190,000 acres on Nipe Bay in Oriente province, the easternmost part of Cuba, at the price of $2.00 per acre (Hoernel, 1976:229). Other Americans followed and by 1905 twenty-nine mills, producing 21 percent of Cuba's sugar, were owned by Americans. In 1902, the Reciprocity Treaty between the U. S. and Cuba was signed, making it possible for the U. S. to buy sugar from Cuba cheaper than from anywhere in the world. "The preference guaranteed Cuba a chance to expand her output of sugar until she supplied all that the U. S. needed from abroad" (Jenks, 1928:139). A Cuban sugar boom ensued: between 1900 and 1904 production increased from 409,272 to 1,312,216 sacks (325 pounds each) in Oriente alone (Hoernel, 1976:229). For all of Cuba the 1905 harvest was the largest ever, and by 1914 double the 1905amount was being produced. Still the immigration of nonwhites was forbidden in 1898 by American military forces occupying the island and this policy was continued by the Ley de Inmigracion y Colonizacion, passed in 1910. Contract labor was also forbidden after 1898, but 150, 000 Spaniards and thousands of others entered HAITIAN EMIGRATION 9 Cuba between 1899 and 1905 anyway. Cuban planters and industrialists pushed through a special immigration bill in July 1906 which authorized the Cuban executive to spend $11 million to attract Europeans to Cuba. But since those who came, again mostly Spanish, could get higher wages in industrial jobs, they seldom went further than Havana. Thus, while an estimated 436,000 Spaniards entered Cuba between 1902 and 1919 (Hoernel, 1976:234), the perennial labor shortage in the ever-expanding sugar industry remained unsolved. In 1912 the United Fruit Company received special permission from Cuban President Jose Gomez to import 1,400 Haitians for harvesting at their operation in Oriente (Guerra y Sanchez, 1935: 201-202). Then, during the next year, the new president, Raul Garcia Menocal, attempted to alleviate the labor shortage in the sugar industry - without relying on black labor by offering to pay a $5 bonus for every white person brought from Panama to work in eastern Cuba. He expected 5, 000 new workers could be obtained this way (Corbitt, 1942). The sugar companies themselves, though, were "afraid to depend entirely on white immigrants" and several got permits for importing a restricted number of black workers during 1913. These permits always stipulated that the blacks were to be returned home after the harvest. World War I upset this piecemeal arrangement, which in any case was not wholly satisfactory for the needs of the sugar industry. Sugar profits sky-rocketed during the war: $163 million in 1914, $202 million in 1915, $308 million in 1916. European beet production collapsed and Cuba regained its position as the greatest sugar producer in the world. In 1917 Cuba entered the war and in 1918 the entire sugar harvest was bought by the allies. The increased sugar demand only intensified the labor shortage. Even though large numbers of Haitians, Jamaicans and others were now entering the country legally and illegally, the shortage of labor was reflected in a dramatic rise in wages. A trade journal complained in 1917: How serious the situation is, is indicated by reports from the eastern provinces that wages have now reached the point where ordinary hoe hands are receiving $3 per day and, in some instances, as much as $5. (Neville, 1917) President Menocal, himself a mill owner, was forced to act. Finally, on August 3, 1917, he signed a law permitting importation of contract labor until two years after the end of the war (Corbitt, 1942). A group of millers and growers, the Association for the Furthering of Immigration, swung into action. Each member pledged $1000 plus a margin of their profits in order to send agents to Haiti, Jamaica and other emigration centers to recruit laborers (Hoernel, 1976:235). This effort met with limited success, for there remained something of a labor shortage until the slump of 1921. 10 INTERNATIONAL MIGRAnON REVIEW A comparison of several sources gives an indication of the magnitude of the labor migration to Cuba during this whole period. According to the 1919 Cuban census, 27,000 Haitians and' 23,000 Jamaicans entered Cuba from 1914 to 1918, inclusive, and in 1919 an additional 10,000 Haitians and 24,'000 Jamaicans entered, along with about 30,000 Spaniards (Thomas, 1971:540). The estimate of Carlos Trelles, presumably taking into account undocumented as well as legal migration, is that between May, 1915 and May, 1921some 81,000 Haitians and 75,000Jamaicans entered Cuba (Guerra y Sanchez, 1935:201-202). Loveira (1929), writing in the late 1920s, says that 40,000 -50,000 immigrant workers came to Cuba 'in good season', half white (mostly Spanish), the rest from Haiti and Jamaica. In bad seasons 20,000 migrants.would enter, from Haiti and Jamaica or from Haiti alone. These figures are comparable to those provided by Castor (1971:84) for legal migration of Haitians to Cuba during the 1920s (See, Table 2), but she contends that illegal migration of between one-third and one-half the legal level should be added for each year, at least during the 1920s. TABLE 2 LEGAL MIGRATION OF HAITIANS TO CUBA, 1912-1929 Year Entered Departed 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928-9 209 1,512 117 2,490 4,878 10,241 11,268 7,329 30,722 12,567 10,152 20,117 21,517 22,970 21,619 14,098 5,500 328 498 25 470 980 1,977 4,427 6,143 12,651 4,267 Source: Balch, p. 77, Castor, p. 83. These figures indicate a stable pattern of migration from Haiti to Cuba from the mid-191Os through most of the 1920s. Millspaugh (1931:143) and Balch (1927:77) both estimate that two-thirds of the Haitians who went to Cuba during this period returned to Haiti. The 1928 annual report of the United Fruit Company shows that of the 11, 000 Haitians employed in 1927, HAITIAN EMIGRATION IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY 11 the vast majority had traveled to Cuba previously, only 2,777 making their first trip (Guerra and Pulpeiro, 1974:78). It is very interesting to note the lack of effect the change in sugar prices in the 1920shad on Haitian migration to Cuba. In 1920 the sugar boom reached its peak, with sugar costing a phenomenal 22. 5 cents per pound for a time. By the end of the year sugar had plummeted to 2 cents per pound. Cuban banks closed, wages immediately dropped, and the labor shortage became a surplus. Since so much of Oriente, by now the most economically dynamic province of Cuba, was provisioned from the U. S., prices for food, clothing and other necessities remained high (Hoernel, 1976:238). Nevertheless, the pattern of migration from Haiti was uninterrupted: it appears to have been little affected by the changed demand for labor. This may in part be due to the fact, suggested by Loveira's commentary, that during years of labor shortage workers would enter Cuba from Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands as well as from Spain, but in years of surplus they would only come from Haiti, or from there and Jamaica. Although wages fell to 40 cents per day in Oriente after 1920 - that is, to a level below that of the 1890s for sugar workers in Cuba - this did not diminish the flow of migrants from Haiti. A standard explanation, seeking the causes of labor migration in the receiving country, cannot explain this occurance. Once a pattern of migration was established it was conditions facing Haitians in Haiti which resulted in its continued stability. Once started, even the shock of a veritable depression in the sugar industry in Cuba could not alter the pattern of migration from Haiti. In fact, the movement of Haitians to Cuba continued through the 1930s, though it is unclear how large the movement was by then, and in spite of the fact that by 1932sugar reached the rock bottom price of 112 cent per pound. It was only in 1937, under pressure from Cuban labor unions which would not work at the wages of the Haitians, that Batista deported thousands of immigrant Haitians and closed the country to them (Leyburn, 1966:271). Then in 1939 the Cuban immigration law was amended with strict new provisions aimed at excluding black (i.e., Haitian) workers (Proudfoot, 1950:50). The early twentieth century also saw the establishment of a strong pattern of migration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic. Previously, in the late nineteenth century, the border between the two countries which shared the island of Hispaniola was ill-defined. The relatively greater concentration of population in the Haitian half led to an osmosis - the spontaneous movement of Haitians into what would later become clearly defined as the Dominican Republic for farming (Moral, 1959). Today there are hundreds of thousands of black Dominicans living in the western part of the Dominican Republic who are descendents of these early migrants. With the development of the sugar industry Haitian laborers migrated to 12 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW the Dominican Republic far less haphazardly and in much larger numbers. The use of Haitian labor apparently coincided with the involvement of American capital in Dominican sugar. As of 1905 there was little American interest in the Dominican Republic, but by 1924 sugar companies owned about one-quarter of the agricultural land in the Dominican Republic. The lion's share of this was American owned. The Central Romana Corporation (today owned by Gulf Western, and still the largest sugar company in the Dominican Republic) owned 144,000 acres of the total 438, 000 dedicated to sugar. Unfortunately, estimates of the magnitude of the migration of Haitians to work in the Dominican sugar industry are few. Castor (1971) considers the movement to have been greater than that to Cuba, and other authors (Lundahl, 1979:625) accept this opinion. The size of these migrations does not mean the work Haitians found in Cuba or the Dominican Republic was desirable by normal standards. It is worth quoting Wingfield at length on these conditions of Haitians in the Dominican sugar fields: The life of a Haitian migrant worker in the Dominican Republic is reminiscent of slavery days. Their work consists of cutting or carting cane from dawn to dusk. The companies provide them with shacks and hammocks but they have to shift for themselves for food. It is incredible how they subsist on a meager diet of a little rice and beans which they cook themselves on open fires with occasionally some bread and very rarely some meat. They get their energy from the cane that they chew all day long while working. .. The return trip is at the expense of the worker and sometimes uses up half of his savings. Some actually walk all the way back... since the majority are illiterate, they are occasionally short-changed when converting their Dominican pesos into Haitian gourdes... It is on the whole a shocking exploitation of people who are educationally and economically deprived and defenseless (Wingfield, 1966:99). Conditions in Cuba were much the same. Since the U. S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1912 to 1924, and since American business interests stood to gain in Cuba and the Dominican Republic from the employment of Haitian migrant labor, it might be suspected that the U. S. government, directly or indirectly, induced migration from Haiti. In fact, the opposite is true. The Haitian government (overseen by American forces) tried repeatedly in the 1920s to stem the flow of migrants from the country, but in vain. In the name of rediscovered nationalism, the dangers of a rapidly diminishing labor force were denounced. The government tried to HAITIAN EMIGRATION 13 limit emigration by increasing passport fees (in 1923, CP), by regulating the operations of hiring companies, and by controlling freelance migration. Emigration was even legally prohibited in 1928. It was fruitless (Millspaugh, 1931:143). The 1928 emigration ban actually had to be revoked five months after it was enacted because it went unheeded. The American military government of the Dominican Republic put restrictions several times on the use of Haitian labor, and in December 1919banned the employment of nonwhite immigrant labor altogether (Hernandez, 1973:59). The first regulations ever on the Dominican border were promulgated in the 1910sby the occupying American forces. Again in 1930 the Dominican border was closed, with no apparent effect on the migration of Haitian labor. Only the massacre of up to 25, 000 Haitians by the dictator Trujillo in 1937 temporarily checked the flow into the Dominican Republic. Trujillo conceived of 'Operation Perejil", literally 'Operation Parsley'. Creole-speaking Haitians were known to have difficulty pronouncing the world parsley in Spanish and this was the only feature which distinguished Haitian from Dominican. Thus Trujillo's troops, garbed in peasant clothes, ranged up and down the border carrying sprigs of parsley. "What is this?" they would ask of the peasant whose nationality they were not sure of. If the reply was pelegil instead of perejit the man was marked for death (Diederich and Burt, 1970:401). Incredibly, despite the massacre, which rid the Dominican Republic of thousands of Haitians living there, migration resumed in 1939. What caused these significant out-migrations of the early twentieth century? Surely without the expansion of the sugar industries in Cuba and the Dominican Republic and the simultaneous lack of such development in Haiti, the migration to these places would not have happened. Yet, if it were a matter of Haitian labor being pulled to the sites of rapid capital expansion, the migration patterns would not have continued after the price of sugar on the world market dropped so drastically after 1920. The inertia of the migration flows after the drop in labor demand in the receiving ~ ountries is what needs to be explained. In Haiti there was a great lack of employment opportunities in the towns. Conditions in Port-au-Prince and other coastal communes were unattractive to families who could, if they remained at home, at least be assured of a tiny plot of land in the mountains or, if they were fortunate, in some reasonably fertile valley (Rotberg, 1971:150). 14 INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW TABLE 3 HAITIAN POPULATION DENSITY, 1820-1914 YEAR POPULATION DENSITY (MILLIONS) (PERSONS/SQUARE KM.) 1820 ·593 21.4 1840 .73 1 26·3 1860 ·935 18 0 1.355 33·7 48.8 1914 1.8 23 65·7 9 As the percentage of the rural population on marginal farming land increased, the propensity for Haitians to migrate out of the country increased. Between the early 1890s and 1914 the population density of Haiti increased significantly - from 48.8 persons per square kilometer to 65.7 (Rotberg, 1971:97). In addition, as has already been noted, until the 1890s the value of exports kept pace with the growth of the population. Then it dropped significantly, so that by the 1910s the prospects for earning a living from selling coffee or other agricultural products was far less encouraging. Between the early 1890sand the 1910s the value of exports per capita actually dropped by about 25 percent, while all during the nineteenth century they had remained stable. This was not merely a matter of prices; the average coffee exports, in quantities, illustrate the same trend. In the early 1890s fifty-one pounds of coffee per person were exported, but in 1905-1914 the figure had fallen to just 33. 2 pounds per person (See, Table 4). For Haitian peasants, who had previously been living right around the minimum subsistence level, such drops in export earnings and quantities exported did not merely represent a diminishing of the standard of living. Many peasants were driven below the minimum subsistence level. For them the alternative was migrate or starve. TABLE 4 AVERAGE QUANTITIES OF COFFEE EXPORTED, 1888-1914 Year Million Pounds Population Pounds Per Person 1. 355 51. 0 1. 778 34. 1 1888-92 69. 12 1893-99 64.86 1905-1914 60.56 Source: Rotberg, Appendix B. HAITIAN EMIGRATION 15 The stability of emigration patterns from Haiti, even in light of declining labor demand in receiving countries, was bolstered by the fact that there was no agent to transform the methods of agricultural production in order to increase productivity. In other Caribbean countries productivity-increasing modernization was achieved in this period as a result of the appearance of American and, to a lesser extent, European interests in agriculture. In Cuba and the Dominican Republic,American capital invested in large scale agricultural undertakings which covered the countryside. Along with this foreign capital came planting, growing, harvesting and other methods which increased the productivity of land. No such influx of foreign capital occurred in Haiti. This is in large part an historical accident: the American occupation of Haiti, which would have been a propitious moment for investment, occurred in 1915. Because of the First World War and the fact that the first attempts at large scale agriculture by American interests (there were two) failed, subsequent foreign investment was discouraged. The peasantry themselves were not capable of saving anything toward investment in improved techniques. Even if savings were somehow possible, the size of the land-holdings made productivity-increasing investment highly unlikely. Because the small Haitian peasant had no savings or surplus land with which to take risks, no innovations occurred. Under conditions where the countryside is not developing, and in the absence of any foreign or domestic capital interest to centralize and modernize agriculture, it is logical that the government would step in to make the investment necessary to halt steadily falling agricultural productivity. Indeed, any government which identifies its own survival with economic development, however defined, and regardless of the original resource endowment of a country, will apply itself to the problem of agriculture. In Haiti, this is precisely the element that was missing; successive Haitian governments (unfortunately right up to the present) have not identified the security of their own position with economic development. As Lundahl (1979:636) puts it: The history of Haiti is the history of clique infighting for the spoils of the presidential office. Economic development has never been a political goal in Haiti. Instead, a never-ending stream of kleptocracies who could think of little else than filling their pockets have squandered the available funds in their attempts to gain or retain the presidency. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, as capitalism spread over the globe, noncapitalist regimes were faced, one after another, with the choice of being subsumed by the far more productive capitalist system ortransforming their own mode of exploitation in imitation of the logic of capitalism. Previously the exploitation of the population was determined by the consumption needs of the rulers, as Marx said, "the exploitation of the serf I 16 INTERNATIONAL MIGRAnON REVIEW was determined by the walls of the lord's stomach". But under capitalism competing units, be they entrepreneurs or entire states, are compelled to continually expand production so as not to be overtaken. Crucially, the web of international capitalism left a gap for Haiti. Being unchallenged by capital, a series of nondeveloping regimes has been allowed to remain in power. Haitian rulers have no interest in developing agriculture because their consumption needs can be met without such development. CONCLUSIONS Standard migration theories see the receiving countries as the dynamic agents which pull migrants to them. An increasing amount of labor is a prerequisite for expanding capital, and as a result these theories predict migration during times of economic growth. These standard theories, while useful for analyzing many cases, seem to be inadequate for the Haitian experience in the early twentieth century. The migrations to Cuba and the Dominican Republic, to be sure, could not have been initiated without the intrusion of (American) capital into the Caribbean. But Haitians were not merely being 'pulled' to sites of rapid capital expansion. Patterns of migration from Haiti to developing areas, once established, appear to have had a good measure of stability - inertia which was relatively independent of the demand for labor in the receiving country. Haitians continued to migrate to Cuba and the Dominican Republic during the 1920s and 1930s, even after the international sugar market collapsed. Pressure from Cuban labor unions led Batista to forcibly expatriate thousands of Haitians in 1937 and General Trujillo massacred thousands of Haitians in the Dominican Republic that same year, which was seventeen years after the collapse of sugar prices. If it were that Haitian labor was responding to labor demand in developing areas alone, these migration patterns are difficult indeed to explain. This is especially so if Haitian emigration is considered as a whole. There has been a steady stream of migrants from Haiti ever since the beginning of the twentieth century. Receiving countries determine where Haitian migrants go; that they will go is determined by conditions in Haiti and by the relationship of Haiti, as the most backward country in the Western Hemisphere, to the rest of the Caribbean. It is factors as they affect Haitians inside Haiti itself that are the causes of out-migration. Haitians have historically had very few employment opportunities at home. The mass of the population is rural peasants, living near the subsistence level. They are extremely sensitive to changes in food prices and to changes in export markets, especially that of coffee. When the 17 HAITIAN EMIGRATION coffee crop collapses due to a drop in prices, as in Haiti during World War I, thousands of Haitians are pushed beyond the brink. Many probably die; others emigrate. In a country where, since the turn of the century, a portion of the population has, at all times, been ripe for emigration, such catastrophes must simply enlarge that portion. REFERENCES Balch, E. G., ed. 1927 Occupied Haiti. New York: Writers' Publishing Company. Castor, S. 1971 La occupacion norteamericana de Haiti y sus consecuencias (1915-1934). Mexico City: Sieglo Vientiuno Editors, S. A. 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