“First and foremost, I want to make sure that Elian’s rights are
protected,” Burton stated. “I am issuing this subpoena to provide a measure
of legal protection while the court is considering this case.”

As strong his political convictions about communism may be, Burton appears
to have another, less lofty motivation for his actions on behalf of the
Cuban-American exile community. A close look at his campaign finances by the
Indianapolis Star has revealed that Burton has raised over $30,000 from
South Florida contributors so far in his current campaign, compared to only
$4,700 — or only one-sixth of that amount –
from backers in his home state.

Burton’s Florida support dates mostly from his role in the 1995
Helms-Burton Act, which he co-authored with Jesse Helms to stiffen the
35-year embargo against Cuba. Helms-Burton penalizes foreign companies
doing business
with Cuban interests that involve land or businesses expropriated from
refugees by the Castro regime. The act also forbids government agencies
from granting Visas to executives from companies that flout the rules and
permit Cuban-Americans to sue them in American courts (though
implementation of this provision has been thwarted several times by
President Clinton) .

Helms-Burton spawned a number of trade controversies with Canada and Europe,
and ultimately has done little to speed Castro’s fall. But Helms-Burton is
a politically important symbol for Cuban-Americans, and they have rewarded
Burton generously for his work. In 1996, for example, he raised $67,550 in the
sunshine state, $25,000 more than he got from his own constituents.

But this is not an isolated case. Burton also is famous for accepting
campaign contributions from donors with South Asian surnames, most of whom
are American Sikhs, whose obscure cause Burton dutifully champions year
after year. (Sikhs hope to establish their own country carved out of India.)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Burton’s fundraising
behavior is highly unusual. Congressional candidates typically raise the
“overwhelming majority” of their campaign funds — the median figure
for the 2000 campaign to date is 83 percent — within their own
state. But so far this election cycle, Burton has done just the opposite,
raising roughly 85 percent of his funding in South Florida. He is also unusual in
that this hasn’t hurt him politically — yet. During the 1998 elections,
fewer than one in ten winning House candidates received the majority of
their campaign funding from out-of-state donors, but Burton has not faced a
serious electoral challenge in years.

“There’s always the question of influence that money buys,” says Peter
Eisner, director of the Center for Public Integrity. “That money buys
access, political clout and it’s a question reversing the question of whose
interests does a congressman or an elected official like Dan Burton
represent? Does he represent the people in general or does he represent
those with special interests? And to what extent is the system working if a
congressman from Indiana is operating on a different playing field? “

Burton’s current drive to keep the Gonzalez boy in the U.S. is not
necessarily playing well with the public. A CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll
indicates only
36 percent of Americans support keeping Elián in the U.S.; 56 percent
believe he should be returned to Cuba. And a Gallup poll in May placed
support for lifting the embargo against Cuba at 51 percent; and an
overwhelming 71 percent would like to see the restoration of political ties
with Havana.

To an increasing number of Americans, apparently, Fidel Castro seems more
like Dr. Evil of Austin Powers infamy than the menacing potentate feared by
previous generations. He’s elderly, his revolution is fraying and people no
longer see him as a credible threat. Instead, Cuba is becoming an
increasingly popular tourist destination for Mojito-swilling young
Americans (who are more than willing to circumvent the current travel ban
by booking flights through Canada or Mexico to bring back a few contraband
cigars).

Many in the generation that came of age at the end of the Cold War have come to
think of Cuba as a sort of Disneyland of communism, a must-visit for those who
missed the Berlin Wall Experience and are confident that Cuba’s jig will be
up just as soon as the next massive wave of Western investment clears Old
Havana’s sea wall. And Burton will hardly be able to claim victory if
Cuban communism collapses once Castro, who is reportedly losing his health,
dies in office — which seems highly likely .

Beyond his antipathy for Castro and his dependence on Cuban exile funds,
Burton says he has yet another motive for advocating on behalf Elián
Gonzáles.
He explained on ABC’s “This Week” that he was also compelled to intervene on
the boy’s behalf because of his own troubled youth.

“I came from an abusive home. My father went to prison for it. What would
have happened if my mother had died and the courts awarded custody?” he
asked a network interviewer. “These decisions must be the right ones. It is
the right decision to delay this thing and study it for now.”

Indeed, as Salon reported in 1998, Burton is the product of a broken home. But to those familiar with Burton’s own widely
reported shortcomings as a father, it was hard to interpret the newfound
passion he seemed to find for parenting last week. In August, 1998, Burton
admitted in an Indianapolis Star interview that he had an illegitimate son
and had payed child support, but was unwilling to meet with the boy.

So, in the end, Burton’s motives are nothing if not multi-layered. He seems
to be trying to refurbish his paternal image, while seeking
a way to keep the lucrative flow of Miami’s “government in exile” cash
pouring into his campaign coffers. And, regardless of whether the public
cares or not, he’s one of the last diehard anti-communists.

What his erstwhile constituents back in Indiana think of all this, and
whether it will affec t his re-election chances, won’t be known until
November.

During the 1960s and 1970s, politicians in my native country, India, used to brandish the slogan “Stop Brain Drain” — a reference to the fact that the cream of India was leaving for the lucrative shores of England and America.

In that post-independence era, when everything foreign was considered tainted by colonialism, we talked of cottage industries and economic imperialism. We threw Coca-Cola out and invented “Thumbs Up.”

But it was also the era of Sputnik, of nuclear power and the green revolution. Every year, on Independence Day, our Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of the benefits of science and technology.

Our institutes of technology, built with European and American aid, offered students free room and board, even stipends. Indian taxpayers footed the bill in the hope that one day the graduates would help reconstruct the nation.

I was one such student. But poring over my textbooks late at night in the library of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), I would dream, not of India, but of America, the land of opportunity. Many students like me, indeed, left during those years, never to return.

So our government set up special programs to tempt foreign graduates. Our leaders saw parallels to the independence movement founded by people like Nehru and Gandhi who, after imbibing Western political ideology at institutions like Eton and Oxford, returned home to serve their motherland.

But few foreign graduates came home to “redeem their pledge,” as Nehru had put it. Our leaders had failed to foresee that the emphasis on symbol manipulation at IIT left little room for social ideology and much scope for capitalistic greed.

Over the next two decades, IIT graduates — educated at the expense of Indian taxpayers — played a major role in founding California’s Silicon Valley. The personal computer revolution and the invention of the internet made the demand for skilled labor mushroom to such gigantic proportions that even if every American child were to study nothing but science from now on, we would be unable to keep pace with demand in the decades to come.

In other words, the legislation would benefit not foreign workers, but American industry which would be crippled without it. In India in the meantime, the entire education system has shifted gears to feed the appetite of the American computer industry. As IIT cannot graduate enough students to fill these needs, so every street corner now sports billboards for private academies offering diplomas in computer programming.

At a book show in my hometown of Nagpur recently, hordes of young people pored over books on engineering and software.

Rhetoric about “Brain Drain” doesn’t hold much water when every politician has a son or a daughter aspiring to go abroad.

And why bother rebuilding the nation when the only goal is to abandon it? At the Nagpur book show, for example, the latest American social treatises were conspicuous by their absence and India’s politically conscious elite has been replaced by a new generation, riding on the wave of the Internet, making fortunes within a span of years.

This new elite has abandoned all talk of economic imperialism in favor of market economics. Indians now put garlands around Bill Gates’ neck and offer him the kind of reception once offered only to the queen. And Thumbs Up is a subsidiary of Coca-Cola.

Mid-sized cities like Bangalore are now the Silicon Valleys of India — their workers generate demand for the very goods they produce. But the nation is slowly disintegrating. India’s population recently hit 1 billion, but its infrastructure in water, transportation and health care is fast crumbling; its citizens breathe air that is dangerously polluted.

India has gone from an agrarian society to the cyber-revolution, bypassing intermediate stages such as the welfare state and the creation of social services.

Perhaps it is time to enact legislation calling for a “Brain Trust.” Funded by corporations like Microsoft and Intel which have drained India of its brains for decades, the trust could set up new institutes in India aimed at training students not in symbol manipulation, but in social thought. Such an effort is our only hope of creating the social infrastructure needed in the next century.

It is an unusual ending to the six-day standoff that shined a spotlight on thousands of otherwise forgotten prisoners — the roughly 2,400 Cubans caught in a prison twilight zone. In Immigration and Naturalization Service lingo, they are “non-removables” — inmates who cannot be deported because the U.S. doesn’t have diplomatic relations with their countries. Nor can the prisoners be released. In 1996, Congress passed a law requiring the INS to incarcerate criminal aliens until they can be deported.

But for the Cubans in St. Martinville, and more than 3,600 other non-removable inmates from countries like Iraq, Libya, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Cambodia and Laos, deportation is not an option. Even if they have already served their criminal sentences, non-deportable inmates are forced to serve a second indeterminate sentence — sometimes for life. One Cuban involved in the St. Martin Parish takeover says he has been in jail 13 years awaiting deportation to Cuba. INS and prison officials have not been able to confirm his story.

INS detainees have become the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. prison population. In 1995, the agency had 6,600 inmates in custody. Today, the agency has more than 17,000. The non-deportable segment of the population is also soaring. A year ago, the INS had 2,800 non-removables. Today it has 3,600.

While the INS says non-deportables make up only a small segment of its detainees, officials admit that their detention creates an important revenue stream for local communities.

The crackdown on detainees has so overwhelmed INS’s own detention centers, that the agency is paying local facilities — like the St. Martin Parish Correctional Center — millions of dollars each year to board its prisoners. But the local jails are often ill-equipped to deal with the inmates, and that lack of preparedness likely contributed to the current standoff, say human rights watchdogs and immigration advocates.

“You see in letter after letter from prisoners the level of frustration, the level of depression that comes from years of indefinite detention,” says Allyson Collins, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. The Washington, D.C.-based international human rights organization issued a lengthy report in September 1998 titled “Locked Away: Immigration Detainees in Local Jails in the United States,” which chastised the INS for warehousing its prisoners in local jails for indefinite periods of time. The organization contends that along with substantial sums of money, the INS is surrendering the welfare of indefinite detainees to officials of small-town jails which in most cases, are not subject to a uniform set of guidelines and are not regularly monitored.

In response to pleas from inmates across the country, Human Rights Watch spent 18 months investigating the INS detention system. Monitors visited 14 jails in seven states and received letters from and interviewed more than 200 INS detainees, including detainees in St. Martin Parish Correctional Center. (Human Rights Watch investigators were not allowed to tour the jail, however.)

What the group discovered was troubling. Detainees cited the denial of appropriate medical care, lack of outdoor exercise, correctional officers without language or other skills necessary to deal with INS prisoners. They also mentioned a shortage of law materials and reading materials in foreign languages, excessive or inappropriate discipline, commingling with accused or criminal inmates, and isolation from family and friends through restrictive telephone, correspondence and visitation policies.

Immigration detainees, whether held in INS detention facilities or in local jails, have a right to legal counsel, but holding them in local jails makes it more difficult for them to obtain legal assistance. And since INS prisoners can be frequently and unexpectedly shuffled from one local jail to another, depending on available bed space, maintaining consistent legal representation can be nearly impossible.

Because the INS doesn’t have space for its burgeoning inmate population, it has farmed them out. Its jails of choice are often in small towns and counties in Louisiana and Texas, where rents range between $30 and $55 a day, per prisoner. That’s cheaper than elsewhere — the INS pays an average of $58 per day, per detainee, with rates running as high as $100 a day in some places. The agency pays $45 per day to the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Office to house each of its approximately 60 prisoners.

This system of farming out detainees to area jails creates a harsh environment for non-removables, Human Rights Watch concluded. While INS enforces minimum standards in its own detention centers and privately contracted facilities, there are few standards for local jails. The result has been inconsistent, inadequate treatment for some detainees. The only laws or regulations regarding detention conditions for INS detainees are four minimal requirements contained in federal regulations: 24-hour supervision, compliance with safety and emergency codes, food service and emergency medical care. No other laws or regulations are in place for facilities holding INS detainees. The loose regulatory environment has fostered an active market for counties eager to make money off of federal prisoners.

A survey of Texas counties with INS contracts conducted last year for the Austin Chronicle found communities making as much as $6 million per year by housing INS prisoners. It’s a windfall that has helped stabilize or lower taxes in some areas and enabled several counties, including Comal County and Denton County, to embark on major capital building projects. These projects include prison expansions, which local officials say are planned at least partly with future INS detainees in mind.

And Texas is not alone. St. Martin Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Capt. Audrey Thibodeaux told reporters recently that the reason the county is holding INS inmates is that, “It’s a source of revenue.” Before the hostage crisis began, 60 of the 160 prisoners being held in the St. Martin jail were non-removable Cubans.

The hostage situation in St. Martinville is the latest incident in which frustrated INS prisoners have lashed out at the system. In March of last year, INS detainees in El Centro, Calif., assaulted security officers, barricaded themselves in their barracks and burned mattresses. In June of 1998, 34 INS detainees were moved out of a Florida jail after they alleged that they had been mistreated by officers at the Jackson County jail. In 1987, Cuban inmates being held by the INS rioted at facilities in Oakdale, La., and in Atlanta.

INS officials contend that the non-removable population is a relatively small part of the 170,000 prisoners who will pass through INS custody this year. “The average length of detention in INS custody for a criminal alien is about 45 days. Our population turns over rather quickly,” said INS spokesman Russ Bergeron. In addition, Bergeron said his agency is trying to move as many non-removable inmates into more secure federal facilities. But it is being constrained by the federal budget. At present, about a quarter of the INS’s non-removable prisoners are being held by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The federal prison system is “better able to handle them and better able to meet the needs of people in long-term custody,” said Bergeron, who added that the INS plans to transfer an additional 1,000 non-removable prisoners to the Federal Bureau of Prisons during the current fiscal year.

But even this INS project won’t do much to quiet critics. In its report last year, Human Rights Watch specifically condemned the U.S.’s indeterminate sentencing policy, saying it is “clearly prohibited by international law.” It also said that “detention becomes arbitrary when detainees, who are not serving a criminal sentence, do not know when they will be released and have no genuine mechanism to challenge the indefinite nature of their detention.”

Two international human rights documents prohibit the use of indefinite detention, including the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which was ratified by the members of the United Nations in 1948. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the United States in 1992, also prohibits the practice.

The cautionary tale is part of a new crusade led by Tarrance, and sponsored by the Republican National Committee, to help build the party’s following among the nation’s growing Latino vote. RNC spokeswoman Leslie Sanchez said Tarrance is part of a new consortium put together by the RNC to reach out to American Latinos.

“We are conducting the first-ever comprehensive Hispanic political marketing strategy,” Sanchez said. “Commercial organizations have been doing this for a decade, and the Democrats have just taken the Hispanic vote for granted.”

Sanchez said the new consortium reflects an acknowledgment by Republicans that the Latino vote may ultimately dictate their political future. “This is a serious approach to the short term as well as the longer term,” she said. “We want the Hispanic community to know that the Republican Party wants to get to know you better. We know ideologically we share the same views, we just haven’t always been the best spokespeople.”

Tarrance told the governors that a racial realignment is underway in America, and that Republicans have historically been slow in recognizing such demographic shifts. He cautioned his party that they had missed out on attracting new Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants at the turn of the century, as well as the urbanization of African-Americans, when 50 percent of American blacks moved out of the South. “If we’re not careful, we’re going to miss it again,” he warned.

The new consortium is the national Republican Party’s effort to prevent that from happening. Other members of the group include Frank Guerra, who orchestrated the media for Rep. Henry Bonilla, the first Republican Latino elected to Congress from Texas, as well as Latino-focused ads for the Texas Republican Party in 1998. Lionel Sosa, who did media for George W. Bush’s reelection bid in 1998, and his wife Kathy are also involved in the new project.

Sanchez said the group is in the process of “laying down the legwork” for their program and plans to unveil a series of television, radio and print ads aimed at Latinos. Sanchez said the RNC has just made a media buy for the first of the group’s ads, but would not disclose the size or location of the media buy.

The new ads will be key in securing Republican success in the fall, Sanchez believes, regardless of who the GOP presidential nominee is. “We’ve come a long way since doing the Macarena,” Sanchez said, in reference to Al Gore’s performance at the 1996 Democratic National Convention. “I keep wanting to say to Al Gore, ‘Drop the Chalupa!’ his act is just so tired.”

While Republicans have received encouraging news from Bush’s success among Texas Latinos in his two campaigns, Tarrance said the party cannot rest on its laurels. “Nine states have 80 percent of the Hispanic vote,” Tarrance said, “and those states are key to national political success.” In his remarks before the group of governors, he joked, “Hey, who needs California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois anyway?”

Tarrance said the group’s new efforts will be key in finding “how simpatico can the Republican agenda be with the Hispanic.” He pointed to the “rough road ahead” in California, where Latinos now make up more than 15 percent of the electorate and are voting for Democrats in droves.

Mike Madrid, former political director of the California Republican Party, welcomed the news of the new national group. He said much of his time with the California state party was spent banging his head against the wall, frustrated that the party leadership did not recognize the importance of the state’s Latino vote.

“What’s ironic is that the Republican establishment has been more open-minded in other states than it has in California,” Madrid said, despite his state’s huge and important Latino electorate. “The national party understands the significance of what’s going on more than the California party does, frankly. It’s like it’s so close to our nose that we can’t see what’s going on.”

Sanchez said that Republicans in California were hurt by the re-election campaign of Pete Wilson in 1994, and his vocal support of Proposition 187, which would have eliminated benefits for undocumented residents. “Republicans were at fault there. Now the issue is getting different types of leadership.”

Tarrance said much of that leadership must come from Republican governors. He said that for the remaking of the party’s image to be complete, a governor would have to take the White House, and put “at least eight governors in his cabinet.”

He acknowledged that there may be some tensions between Republican governors and the Congressional leadership, but that the governors must take the lead. He likened members of the Republican revolution of 1994, led by Newt Gingrich, to kamikaze pilots who were “instrumental in breaking down some of the walls. But you don’t govern with the same group.”

“I’m applying for a job held by an Arkansan,” Buchanan joked to the students.

Buchanan used familiar sound bites to address his switch from the GOP to the Reform Party: “I’ll have to body slam Jesse Ventura,” though not “literally,” Buchanan stated, in describing how he would be putting the Reform Party leader in his place.

The TV commentator/candidate said he is campaigning on two main issues: war and peace, and communist China. No one ever said Buchanan discusses warm and fuzzy issues, of course, and no one said he sticks to just two.

Buchanan’s war and peace agenda ranges from Serbia to isolationism to immigration to embargoes and sanctions. It’s all under the rubric of “America First” — that the U.S. is losing its identity to a melting-pot madness, that immigrants are rapidly changing the face of America, and stealing its chances to have liberty and independence.

It’s simple, really. According to Buchanan, the world is going to hell in a hand basket and he is the guy to save the day. Apparently he intends to do this by denouncing Europe’s “superstate” and demanding that the U.S. close its borders to any further immigration.

“We should take our young men and women in the armed forces out of foreign countries and put them on the borders that count, along California and Texas,” preached Buchanan.

He also ranted and raved about Monday’s decision by the Clinton administration to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in exchange for China’s commitment to open up its markets to U.S. exports.

The students at the private Christian school clapped when Buchanan told them that “We gave her [China] $60 million in surplus from us and they use it to persecute Christians, build weapons targeting Taiwan and build missiles targeting the U.S.” This is standard stump stuff from Pitchfork Pat, and it played well down in central Arkansas.

If Buchanan was in the White House, he said, the agreement between China and the WTO would never have been consummated. His plan? To bring in the Chinese premier — he didn’t mention his name and therefore couldn’t get it wrong — for a stern Oval Office lecture.

He says that he’d wag his finger and tell the Chinese to “stop harassing our friends on Taiwan, stop pointing missiles at my country and stop persecuting Christians, or you’ve sold your last pair of chopsticks in any mall in the United States of America.”

Standard sound bites all, but Buchanan clearly enthralled these students with his tough talk. They cheered his fantasy about dealing with China, and they laughed when he said Bush and Gore were identical twins, just running on separate high-dollar tickets. They clapped when he said the Department of Education should cease to exist, and that vouchers should become the way of life for America’s school children.

“You don’t need some guy in sandals and beads in Washington telling you what to do with your education,” said Buchanan, without identifying who exactly this latter-day hippie he was describing might be. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley, perchance? Probably not.

The students’ questions appended a smidgen of comic relief to Buchanan’s overheated oration. Laura Moser, 16, asked a stunning first question that shocked Buchanan speechless. She asked how Buchanan could guarantee he “wouldn’t follow in Bill Clinton’s footsteps.”

“I’ve never been asked that before,” said Buchanan, red-faced. “There’s never been nobody like Bill Clinton. Back in New Hampshire in 1992, I admired how he stood up, took his medicine and fought back.” But then, Buchanan said, the president did some “shameful things.” Finally, he recovered his poise enough to say that, if he is elected, he will “set a leadership that this generation can be proud of.”

He never did answer Laura’s question, though.

In answer to another question, Buchanan said he would put Supreme Court justices on the bench who will reverse the Roe v. Wade decision and turn abortion control over to the states. More cheers and applause from the students.

Buchanan stayed long after the final bell rang, expounding on his policies for the next century to a handful of students, all of whom pledged they would tell their parents to vote for him.

Later that evening, Buchanan met 100 supporters at the Embassy Suites (at $50 a head) to sign copies of his revisionist history, “A Republic Not an Empire,” and to chit-chat about his view of the state of the world.

He delivered his lecture in Oprah/Liddy style, roaming in front of his audience with a mike on his tie, rattling off a litany of what Americans should beware of in the next century — global bureaucrats, the “dark age” of nation-states, big money in politics, superduper pensions for the likes of Clinton, Gore and even Newt Gingrich.

“Newt will get $3-4 million in a pension,” said Buchanan. “Of course, he’ll need it for the alimony …”

Buchanan’s choicest cuts, however, were saved for the Clintons. He said his wife Shelly couldn’t make his appearance because she was “looking at a Senate seat up in New York.”

Buchanan told his supporters that he’s already seeking a vice presidential candidate, preferably a anti-abortion Democrat and possibly a woman.

Buchanan referred to his real competition — the powerful Ventura wing of the Reform Party, which backs billionaire Donald Trump — only in passing. “It will be a robust competition,” Buchanan said. “And as for that tax of Trump’s, let’s see him give up 14 percent of his wealth first and then we will believe him.”

Those who paid $50 to mingle with Buchanan apparently left satisfied that he has a good chance to prevail over Ventura, Gore and Bush, not to mention all of those foreign leaders that George W. couldn’t name a few weeks back.

Just one thing: He might want to work up a little better response to young Laura Moser’s question, just in case it pops up again somewhere down the line.