When Obama dropped the ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy, he also snuffed out another program few Americans knew about

The L.A. Times reports:

When President Obama killed the 22-year-old policy giving preferential, fast-track citizenship to Cubans who could make it to the U.S., his administration nixed another program, too. Not well known to most Americans, it sought to undermine the Cuban government through a form of brain drain.

The Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, created in 2006 under then-President George W. Bush, aimed to lure away some of the tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and other medical workers the island nation dispatched around the world, in what the Castro government touted as Cuban Medical Internationalism.

The U.S. strategy was an appendix to the “wet foot, dry foot” policy created in the 1990s. Under “wet foot, dry foot,” Cubans who reached American soil on their own could stay in the U.S. But the medical parole program offered a path to American citizenship through any U.S. embassy and consulate abroad, according to a 2009 U.S. Department of State fact sheet.

Obama has always been concerned about creating future Republican voters.