ABSTRACT
As the decade of the 1990s began, President George Bush proclaimed the end of the Cold War. The communist-induced refugee flows in Europe and the long-standing turmoil that had generated refugee flows in Central America seemed to be at an end. The streams of refugees from the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia who were entering the United States under the Lautenberg Amendment’s softened standard of refugee eligibility were manageable. Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been democratically elected president of Haiti in December of 1990, and the Haitian exodus had ceased. But subsequent events in Haiti and Cuba soon revived the specter of floodtides of asylum seekers.
