Fear on Repeat: The Mariel Boatlift and Today's Immigration Rhetoric
How the refugee crisis in 1980 mirrors our current moment
When I was a kid growing up in South Florida, I read voraciously. At breakfast, I would read cereal boxes, magazines, and even my mom’s Harlequin romances, if they were lying around. I would also read The Miami Herald, much to my father’s amusement. In my defense, the comics section was my gateway drug.
I’m not claiming to remember most of the news from 1980—after all, I was in elementary school. However, I do remember a few top stories, like the Iran hostage crisis and the disastrous rescue attempt. I also remember the Liberty City and Overtown riots, after the police killed Arthur McDuffie, a Black insurance agent and former Marine.
But most of all, I remember blaring headlines about the Mariel boatlift. Being the little nerd that I was, I’m sure I read about the events that led up to the boatlift, but I don’t think I had a sense of how it would escalate. In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like the U.S. government did, either.
As I was reading an article about the ICE deportations, a memory of the boatlift bubbled up from the dark, mysterious depths of my ADHD brain. I was struck by the way the framing of our current immigration situation seemed to mirror the hysteria around the Marielitos, as the Cuban refugees were called. I wanted to examine the parallels, so I wrote this piece. (Here’s me, giving myself a pep talk as I freelance and job hunt.)
Why Did Castro Allow So Many Cubans to Flee Cuba?
He didn’t have much of a choice. The boatlift started when six Cuban men, unhappy living under Fidel Castro’s regime, drove a city bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy to seek asylum. This rather aggressive tactic had worked at the Venezuelan embassy the year before, but this time, the police were prepared and opened fire. One of the officers died from a ricocheting bullet—and Castro was furious.
He urged Peruvian officials to hand over the gate-busters, but they refused. In a fit of pique, Castro removed the police guarding the gates. Of course, people began rushing the embassy, despite violent pro-Castro mobs trying to run interference. Castro declared that anyone who entered would not be allowed to leave—but only a few days later, 10,000 Cubans were literally jammed shoulder-to-shoulder on embassy grounds. There were so many that they had to sleep standing up.
As you might imagine, Castro was both embarrassed and enraged, but at some point, he seemed to realize that there wasn’t much he could do to get these people back without violating international law. On May 1, 1980, he opened the port of Mariel for departures for a six-month window. These “parasites,” as he called them, should just go to the United States—if they could find a way to get there.
President Jimmy Carter said he’d welcome the refugees “with open arms,” expecting about 3,500 Cubans. Unfortunately, Carter was a little naive. Remember, about 10,000 Cubans had taken refuge in the embassy, plus Castro seized the chance to get rid of what he considered “trash”: convicted criminals, the mentally ill, LGBTQ+ people, and sex workers. Over the next few months, approximately 125,000 refugees arrived in South Florida.
Even now, estimates vary as to how many people were released from mental health institutes and prisons. Some say the percentage was between 2-4% and most were political prisoners. Others say up to 20,000 had criminal records while thousands more were released from mental hospitals. However, the latter number seems unlikely unless most of the refugees were political prisoners.
Cuban exiles sent a flotilla of 1,700 fishing boats for their relatives, but even they had underestimated the demand. I vividly remember the pictures of dangerously overloaded boats on the front page of the paper. It’s only 94 miles from Cuba to the iconic Southernmost Point Buoy in Key West, but bad weather can make it a risky crossing. I was worried about these people risking their lives on rickety shrimping boats that were badly overloaded.
It was a tumultuous time for South Florida, the United States, and the world.
A Little Bit of Light in a Dark Time
Stonewall had happened just over a decade prior, so the gay rights movement was still not very accepted. The US technically had a ban on gay immigrants and some states had laws against gay sex. However, the situation was somewhat better than it was in Cuba, where homosexuals were actively classified as criminals.
Luckily, Carter didn’t ask, and no one “told,” so his administration didn’t stop any gay people from entering. According to some sources, the Mariel boatlift may have been the tipping point that normalized gay immigration, even though the law wasn’t officially changed for another ten years. Considering the AIDS crisis reared its ugly head the following year, I’m guessing the LGBTQ+ Cubans just made it in under the wire.
The Parallels Between 1980 and 2025
The thing I remember most from that time in South Florida is the way emotions ran high. Granted, it wasn’t an easy time—the influx of Marielitos over just a few months genuinely strained local resources. But, at least from my recollection, that was only a minor discussion point. Many South Floridians were convinced that they’d be murdered in their beds by “mental patients” and criminals.
The media didn’t help much, using incendiary language about the refugees. My parents ran a restaurant that catered to an older clientele, and trust me when I say I remember customers who were absolutely terrified. It wasn’t a coincidence that Tony Montana’s extraordinarily violent character in Scarface, released three years later, was a Marielito.
If you’ll allow a digression: my parents scrimped and saved to send me to an expensive private school. Ironically, two friends’ dads were separately arrested for drug dealing a couple of years later, and they were both very rich, white men. I also learned—much later—that another classmate’s stepfather was Jimmy Hoffa’s sidekick and was a character in The Irishman. Also a rich, white man!
Now, back to our regular programming: It’s kind of astonishing how the earlier talking points mirror our modern rhetoric. Here’s the Southern Poverty Law Center on a book of incendiary cartoons produced by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):
“Miami is depicted as looted and destroyed by the Marielitos. In the accompanying commentary, FAIR blames the Cubans for causing ‘chaos and crime’ that ‘crippled Florida’s tourist trade.’”
The cartoons also claimed immigrants were taking “Black jobs” (although I’m quoting…someone else here) and said other countries viewed our “inability to control our borders as a weakness to be exploited.”
Here are some examples of the cartoons.
As you can see, these issues touch on the fears we still face today: an open border, job loss, and “exploiting” the U.S. taxpayer.
How Fear Around Immigration Was (And Is) Exploited
Given what you’ve seen so far, I’m guessing you’ve connected the dots. In case you haven’t, buckle up because I’m about to use a lot of exclamation points:
Crime waves! Immigrants taking jobs! Minorities pitted against each other! Porous borders! The gay agenda! All of these things create fear—and nothing is more useful to the powers-that-be than creating division.
One unexpected parallel from 1980 did surprise me: tattoos. Apparently, there was hysteria around the tattoos of some of the refugees. From what I can gather, many Cubans had tattoos at a time when body art was still considered quite dubious. This article from 1983 talks about how former inmates used tattoos to “advertise” their crimes, but later studies seem to refute this. Former Cuban inmates often did have tattoos, but they were not “advertising” their crimes; it was part of jailhouse culture. Many Cubans without criminal records also had tattoos related to Afro-Cuban religions like Santeria.
This lack of cultural understanding persists. In 2025, as I’m sure everyone reading this is aware, ICE and other organizations are deporting or jailing migrants over tattoos. ICE has a list of tattoos that are falsely believed to signify an alliance with Tren de Aragua. Venezuelan men have been sent to CECOT for tattoos of hummingbirds or palm trees, apparently with no other evidence of criminal behavior.
Mother Jones reports that Neri Alvarado Borges, a young Venezuelan man, was sent to CECOT due to a tattoo he got in support of his younger brother, despite having zero evidence that he belonged to Tren de Aragua.
“Alvarado told [his boss] Hernández that an ICE agent had asked him if he knew why he had been picked up; Alvarado said that he did not. “Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent replied, according to Hernández. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
The agent then asked Alvarado to explain his tattoos and for permission to review his phone for any evidence of gang activity. “You’re clean,” the ICE officer told Alvarado after he complied, according to both Hernández and María Alvarado. “I’m going to put down here that you have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.”
For reasons that remain unclear, Hernández said that another official in ICE’s Dallas field office decided to keep Alvarado detained. María Alvarado said her brother told her the same story at the time.”
Obviously, tattoos do not automatically indicate a gang affiliation. Neither does wearing Chicago Bulls merch, although that’s another item on the ICE checklist.
Unfortunately, we haven’t learned from our mistakes. In 1983, The New York Times reported that the Mariel boatlift hadn’t increased crime in any significant way. While many refugees did struggle due to language and education issues, there were definitely Marielito success stories. But that same year, Scarface was in movie theaters, drumming up fear once more.
Today, it seems like we’re backtracking even further. In 1980, many people bought into a knee-jerk fear of criminals, the mentally ill, and LGBTQ+ people. (Remember, many of these criminals were likely political prisoners.) While, of course, it’s not okay to fear a group of people, it wasn’t a time when society made it acceptable to talk about mental illness, addiction, or homosexuality. It’s always easier to fear marginalized people.
But in 2025, we don’t have the same excuse. However, it seems like large portions of society still fear those same marginalized people, plus migrants in general—even “model migrants” on a student visa like Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. It’s hard to understand how a seemingly unassuming and gentle PhD student warranted an arrest by five or six ICE agents.
We all know the big-picture solution to the situation we’re in: a balanced, humane, pragmatic approach to immigration. I’m not an expert on immigrant labor by any means, but it seems like we should expand the H2 Guest Worker program, which allows workers to enter for a set amount of time before they return home again until they get another job and visa. From what I’ve read (which I cannot claim is totally comprehensive), it seems like this allows migrant workers to earn money but doesn’t trap them in this country for decades.
Obviously, there should be more oversight of the program to ensure workers are treated well and fairly. The program should also allow workers to switch employers, something that’s not currently allowed and which means workers can be easily abused. We also need to expand the path to legal citizenship.
Most importantly, we need to think critically about the messaging we’re seeing from politicians and the media. Undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born Americans. And if they are accused of a crime, they deserve due process; if convicted, they should be returned to the authorities in their own country, rather than being shipped to a prison in El Salvador or South Sudan.
The echoes of 1980 remind us that fear-based immigration rhetoric isn't new—but we can choose compassion over hysteria and facts over fear-mongering.
Fingers crossed.