U.S. Should Invite Haiti to Become 51st State

Haiti Needs a Marshall Plan And to Be Invited to Become a Part of The United States

If the United States of America, one of if not the most generous nations in the world, really wants to help the unspeakable suffering of the Haitian people, she should implement a modern day Marshall Plan, after the Herculean effort implemented to rebuild Europe from its World War II devastation.

To merely pour hundreds of millions of dollars into a nation without ensuring that it won’t sink back into abject poverty is, in my opinion, both a waste of valuable resources and a lack of good financial stewardship. Surely we have tired of continually hearing about the fact that Haiti is “the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.” We will continue to lament the tune of that broken record unless someone takes the initiative to do something which will have long-lasting effects.

I suggest (drum roll here) that Haiti become part of the United States, either as a territory, as is Puerto Rico, or better yet, as our 51st state. A nation that is approximately the size of Maryland with a population of about 10,000,000 people, it has about the same population of Michigan (2006 estimate). And rest assured that if you took a political x-ray of me you wouldn’t find one imperialistic or colonialistic bone in my 52 year old body.

The reality is that nations such as Haiti haven’t done much if anything to prove that they can survive as sovereign nations. With the world’s economies in a constant state of flux, helping nations like Haiti is becoming more and more troublesome. Here we have the United States, with an unemployment rate over 10%, about to send about $100,000,000 of aid to an impoverished nation which will continue to be impoverished once the cameras have left. Why not politely petition the Haitian people and in a politically correct manner ask them if they would like to become a member of the most powerful nation on earth. This way they would be assured of having unending resources because they would then have congressional representation, ie, two U.S. senators, and about the same amount of members in the House of Representatives as Michigan.

Now of course the question has to be answered as to what would become of Haiti’s current leaders, a question which has no easy answer. But in all fairness, at the very least Haiti’s president, Rene Preval, could be the first governor of the sovereign state of Haiti, and the other government leaders could be its first members of Congress, with the top two leaders under the current president as its two senators. This political arrangement would then suffice until general elections could be held.

Now I know that many Americans (especially on the political left), Haitians, and foreigners such as Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea and others, would decry this as another example of U.S. imperialism/colonialism. But who has a better solution? Once the dead and injured are removed from the millions of tons of rubble and buried (many ingloriously and in gruesome and ghastly manners, such as the opening and dumping of corpes into decades-old crypts), and some semblance of order is restored to the island, what will become of it? I say rebuild the nation which was founded by a slave revolt in 1804 and then offer them as much red, white, and blue, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.