Meeting the Moment: The Role of the Diaspora in Haiti's Future

Published after Prime Minister Garry Conille's July 2024 visit to Washington to mobilize the diaspora against 'Haiti fatigue', this USIP analysis assesses how the roughly 1.2 million U.S.-based Haitians could become a decisive factor in the country's stabilization. Unlike Cuban or Dominican communities, the Haitian diaspora lacks a unified voice and strategic focus, limiting its policy influence despite contributing up to 30 percent of Haiti's national income through remittances. The authors propose a sequence: an accurate socio-economic mapping of the community (building on the Haitian American Foundation for Democracy's survey), broad outreach to build a consensus policy agenda, and advocacy for concrete instruments such as the Global Fragility Act's Haiti strategy, the Haiti Criminal Collusion Transparency Act and the HOPE/HELP trade acts.

Because remittances mostly finance household consumption, they are not a sustainable development channel; the diaspora should enable targeted capital flows into key economic sectors and transfer professional expertise through coordinated mechanisms, modeled on Jamaica's Global Jamaica Diaspora Council or the U.S. Presidential Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement. Within Haiti, avenues include linkages to the Transitional Presidential Council's priorities, revival of embassy fellowship programs placing young Haitian Americans in ministries, a promised parliamentary seat under the Tardieu-sponsored constitutional reform, and exercising diaspora voting rights under the amended 1987 constitution.