Making Migrants “Criminal”: The Mariel Boatlift, Miami, and U.S. Immigration Policy in the 1980s

In 1980, nearly 125,000 Cubans sailed to Florida in the mass migration now known as the Mariel Boatlift. They arrived amidst reports that Cuban officials had released many of them from prisons and forced them onto boats bound for the United States. A significant minority of these “Mariel Cubans” had been incarcerated at some point in the past, but press accounts often distorted their stories and they entered a United States with a growing anti-immigrant movement that contributed to a largely hostile reception. While many Mariel Cubans eventually became incorporated into the established South Florida Cuban community, some continued to struggle to find their way. The focus of this article is on this latter group. It reveals the exclusionary and punitive dynamics that emerged in response to them in Miami and how the resulting demands for policy change were scaled up by elected officials to shape developments at the federal level that ultimately made “criminals” out of a much broader group of people who crossed U.S. borders in the 1980s and beyond.