Border policy troubles U.S.

Haitians on the U.S. Navy base in Guatanamo Bay have new neigh bors in the military's booming tent city.

In the glory days of the Cold War, any person reaching our borders from a communist nation was granted instant political asylum. Cubans figuring high on the list.

Now, in 1994, with the Cold War over, U.S. policy regarding immigration has slightly altered - somewhat like the way Dr. Banner's physique alters slightly when he becomes the Incredible Hulk.

The flood of refugees from Cuba has posed a troubling question for the United States. After a large number of Cubans entered Florida in 1980 and seriously impacted the state's economy, finding a way to deal with immigrants has become an issue that requires immediate attention

At first, the U.S. policy was to dump all the immigrants in G uatanamo - thinking that the tidal wave of Cubans would stop or at least slow when they found out that entry into the United States would not be granted. But the immigrant camps are filling quickly. It seems that the internment camps are more attrac tive than their homeland.

Last week, the Clinton Administration asked a dozen Caribbean and Latin American governments to set up other refugee camps to ease the burden on Guatanamo and to also provide a still less attractive existence for Cuban ho pefuls.

The flow of Cuban refugees continues to escalate. The Clinton Administration may start allowing more Cubans to enter the United States through legal immigration if Fidel Castro agrees to stop his citizens from going to sea on rafts.

Som e Haitians have been screaming for years about the preferential treatment the Cubans have been receiving from the United States. All that has now changed. Haitians and Cubans are both occupying a 45 square-mile chunk of Cuba called Guatanamo.

Equa lity for all is the ideal this country is striving for. Allowing some asylum and turning away others seems unfair.

The immortal words incribed on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free," j ust is not economically feasable anymore. The best we can accomplish is to pretend to believe in those immortal words and hope that the refugees of the world seek to establish the American prinicples of equality for all without actually copying the wa ys our society has tried to achieve them.

We cannot allow the chance of equality to equate into a formula for more economic suffering for all Americans.