Much of the congressional debate over illegal immigration has focused on the millions of Mexicans who slip into this country looking for work and a better way of life. That’s understandable, since Mexicans make up the majority of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country.

But if it’s truly the tired, the poor and the huddled masses that this country has a special place for, then of all the people who are trying to get here from other parts of the Western Hemisphere, Haitians are most deserving of a warm reception.

Why? Because we owe them a piece of our freedom.

A unit of Haitian volunteers fought alongside George Washington’s Revolutionary War army in 1779. One of them, Henri Christophe, became a leader of the black nation after it won its independence from France in 1804.

And we owe it to them because we played a role in Haiti’s downward spiral from the hemisphere’s richest colony to its poorest nation. Shortly after Haiti won its war of independence, the United States cut off all trade with the black-ruled state, an action that helped rupture its economy. This country didn’t recognize Haiti until 1862.

From 1915 to 1934, the United States occupied Haiti and created the army that a succession of Haitian leaders used to brutalize their people.

Back in 1992, as George H.W. Bush was leaving the White House and Bill Clinton was moving in, I went to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to see how U.S. officials were treating the Haitian refugees who had been stopped at sea by the Coast Guard. Nearly 7,000 Haitians were housed in a sea of military tents pitched on the tarmac of an abandoned airfield. This blazing encampment was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and patrolled by armed guards.

These people were fleeing a country where the blood of dissidents flowed through the streets almost daily. But instead of allowing these “huddled masses” into this country, Bush – and for too long, Clinton – had them held like runaway slaves.

The irony of this is that Cubans – who have experienced nothing like the kind of wholesale slaughter that has wracked Haiti for decades – are allowed to stay in the United States if they manage to make it ashore.

While most Cubans picked up at sea are returned to the communist nation, those who make it to land get to stay. This “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy does not apply to people who try to steal into this country from Haiti.

Four years ago, Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson revealed that the Bush administration had enacted a “secret” policy that put Haitians who entered this country – including those requesting asylum – into detention centers.

Despite this history of bad treatment, the plight of Haitians who try to enter this country illegally has gotten virtually no notice. Most of those Haitians I’ve encountered were driven out of their country by political violence. They’re not rushing our borders simply to work jobs that people here won’t do. They are “yearning to breathe free” like millions of others beckoned to this country by those words at the base of the Statue of Liberty.