Over the past year, roughly 68,000 unaccompanied minors crossed the Mexican border into the United States. That now-slowing surge prompted a backlash against Democratic plans to implement immigration reform, whether by legislation or executive action. Now, Republicans including New Hampshire candidate Scott Brown are warning that these undocumented immigrants might be carrying Ebola. Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who led a Tea Party effort in Congress to block federal funding to manage the crisis, declared "we cannot solve the crisis at the border without stopping President Obama's amnesty."
But for one group of migrants, Ted Cruz and most of his GOP allies are only too happy to provide amnesty and a path to citizenship. And as it turns out, the number of Cubans pouring into the United States by sea and land is rapidly increasing.

As the New York Times reported this week, some 25,000 Cubans including 24 year-old Leonardo Heredia arrived in the U.S. without travel visas in the past year:

He, like many others, is also an unexpected throwback to a time that experts thought had long passed: the era when Cubans boarded homemade vessels built from old car parts and inner tubes, hoping for calm seas and favorable winds. As the number of Cubans attempting the voyage nearly doubled in the past two years, the number of vessels unfit for the dangerous 90-mile crossing also climbed.
Not since the rafter crisis of 1994 has the United States received so many Cuban migrants. The increase highlights the consequences of a United States immigration policy that gives preferential treatment to Cubans and recent reforms on the island that loosened travel restrictions, and it puts a harsh spotlight on the growing frustration of a post-Fidel Castro Cuba.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba and the 1966 Cuba Adjustment Act--two anachronisms of American foreign policy--are once again having the effect of producing a new wave of Cubans fleeing to the United States. As Peter Weber explained in The Week:

Since 1966, Cuban immigrants have had special protections and paths to citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act. Cuban nationals don't have to enter the U.S. at a designated port of entry. There are no quotas limiting the number who can immigrate here. And under a 1995 adjustment to the policy called "wet feet, dry feet," all Cubans who make it to shore are eligible for legal U.S. residency after one year, and eventually citizenship. In other words: amnesty.

But these are not political refugees seeking asylum from the Castro regime and its Soviet paymasters, but better economic opportunities here. And more and more, the Cubans are not arriving, like Elian Gonzales, escorted by Peggy Noonan's magical "dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels." Instead, they are entering in Texas, crossing the same Mexican border Republicans would close off to Central American children.

Mr. La O became one of the more than 22,500 Cubans who arrived in the United States by land last fiscal year -- most of them in Texas. That is nearly double the number who did so in 2012.
Some of those migrants flew to Mexico and then requested entry at the Texas border. Relaxed travel rules in Cuba now allow people to exit the country more freely, a change that experts say plays a part in the surge in Southwest border arrivals. Other people, like Mr. La O, made the first leg of the journey by sea to Central America or Mexico.

It's with good reason that Weber concluded, "there is one big exception to the Tea Party's opposition to 'amnesty': Cuba."
Which is why it's long past time for the United States to overhaul its policies towards immigration and Cuba that only serve to produce such absurd and tragic outcomes. There aren't Soviet missiles, advisors or troops in Cuba; there aren't Cuban troops in Angola. While Vladimir Putin may boast of reopening Russian spying facilities in the Island, Cuba presents no threat to the United States. As the past two presidential elections have shown, the old irredentist Cuban communities in Florida can no longer have a stranglehold over the state's politics. And with 11 million undocumented immigrants--85 percent of them in America for over five years--stuck in legal limbo here, it's to end that two-word "get out of jail free" card" automatically accepted in Florida and Texas: "I'm Cuban."