Unemployment is estimated at more than 70 percent, and the average Haitian tries to subsist on about $10 a month. The United States, European and foreign donors are withholding about $500 million worth of aid packages -- roughly the amount of the country's annual budget -- because of election violations and corruption in President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government. The largest segment of what passes for Haiti's economy is remittances from immigrants in the United States that are estimated to be $700 million a year. But the money from America declined sharply after 9/11, when many Haitian workers in service and travel-related industries lost their jobs because of the economic slump. Haiti remains rife with political violence, gang killings and drug-related murders.

Perhaps the most telling sign of how deep Haiti's problems run are the recent public pleadings from Jean-Claude Duvalier, the ex-dictator exiled in Paris since 1986, who says he wants to return to the country and "end the chaos." If that's the idea of relief, it is understandable why Haitians want to leave and why boats carrying hundreds of migrants continue to wash up on Florida's shores.

The Post reported last month that many Haitians first go to the Bahamas, where smugglers charge them about $2,500 each to run through Coast Guard interdiction routes and reach Palm Beach County. Haitians who make it through the pipeline face indefinite detention if caught because of Attorney General John Ashcroft's post-9/11 crackdown. Yet the government gives Cubans making the same trip asylum, due to the archaic 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. Many Haitians can make cases as political refugees, who face persecution at home, better than Cubans.

Mr. Ashcroft startled even members of the administration recently when he said Haiti could be a staging ground for Palestinian and Pakistani terrorists. If he expects to be taken seriously, there is added reason not to allow conditions in Haiti to fester. The Coast Guard has the capability to increase patrols and disrupt the pipeline to the Bahamas and to the United States. If Mr. Ashcroft is taken at his word, tighter U.S. control is necessary.

As always, however, the root of the migrant problem is on the island. As long as Haiti is the poorest nation in the hemisphere, its people will take any risk to find hope elsewhere. A decade ago, Congress balked when the Clinton administration wanted to expand aid and build roads, hospitals and water plants. Republicans rejected the plans as "nation-building." The now nation-building Bush administration may want to ignore Haiti indefinitely and detain Haitian migrants indefinitely, but writing off Haiti as an unsolvable problem dumps the problem onto Florida. Definitely

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