The Haiti earthquake "is not an opportunity to immigrate into the United States," dpa quoted US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano as warning today. Haitians should stay in their country to help rebuild it, Napolitano said in the Spanish city of Toledo, where she attended a European Union interior ministers' meeting on Thursday. The US had decided to grant temporary legal status to Haitians who were in the country illegally before the January 12 earthquake, Napolitano said. That would help them find work and to send money to their relatives back home, she explained. However, Haitians who tried to enter the United States illegally after the earthquake would be repatriated, the secretary of state said. Washington would try to speed up the arrival into the country of Haitian orphans whose adoptions had been decided on before the earthquake, Napolitano said. The priority, however, was reuniting Haitian families, she stressed, saying the US was working with the Haitian government and with international institutions towards that end.
