Ann Arbor – The vile and disgusting tactic of J.D. Vance and Don Trump of spreading false, racist charges against Haitians of eating the pets of suburbanites is nothing unexpected. The MAGA wing of the Republican Party thrives on finding poor, weak victims and demonizing them. First they manufacture an imaginary threat, then they pose as the champions of Das Volk — oops, I mean, the people, as the ones who can save them from this menace.
Haitian workers, having legally come into the U.S., started going to Springfield, Ohio, for jobs in 2018 when Trump was president. The Springfield municipal authorities needed workers and were happy to have them come in. Their numbers have almost certainly been vastly exaggerated.
In fact, the Trump administration did not cut immigration. Trump issued green cards at about the same annual rate as the Obama administration until the advent of COVID. The annual rate of green card issuance went back to normal under Biden-Harris but did not increase over what Trump had been doing. Trump’s immigration scare is just a scam — the US has been averaging about a million legal immigrants a year for a long time, and that continued under Trump before the pandemic.
Why target Haitians? Some on social media have suggested that it is a slam at Kamala Harris’s paternal ancestry in Jamaica, an attempt to smear all Caribbean-Americans as deviants.
Haitians have fled Haiti in some numbers, but they aren’t the only emigrants from the Caribbean to the US and are not distinctive percentage-wise. There are about 1.1 million persons of Haitian descent in the U.S., while the population of Haiti is 11.5 million. That’s 9.5% of the population in the U.S. But there are 2.5 million persons of Dominican descent in the U.S., and the population of the Dominican Republic is almost identical to that of Haiti. That’s nearly 22% of Dominica in the US.
Haitian emigration, like all emigration, is driven by pull factors and push factors. The US economy and demand for jobs are pull factors. Natural disasters and gang governance are push factors. Hurricane Matthew in 2016 destroyed 200,000 homes and left over a million people without housing. Hurricanes have gotten more powerful and destructive because Americans put 4 or 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year from burning coal, fossil gas and petroleum. So Matthew was extra destructive and it is our fault. There are many reasons for which the US owes Haiti reparations.
The murder rate in Haiti is 40 per 100,000 per annum. In the US recently it is about 6 per 100,000 per annum. In France it is 1.4 per 100,000 per year, which shows just how violent the US is. But Haiti is more so.
The Trump-Vance smear of Haitians as eaters of family pets in part refers obliquely to the violent conditions from which Haitian immigrants have fled. There are some 200 armed gangs in Haiti. They have around 12,000 members. But obviously most Haitians are not gangbangers. In fact, 11,488,000 are not. As with Mexico, US-made semi-automatic weapons have flooded the island and worsened violence. But over one million in the US came here in part to get away from that kind of thing. Trump and Vance want to smear hard-working blue collar Haitian families.
This demonization of an entire ethnic group is typical of fascist politics. The Nazis also accused German Jews of spreading false rumors, of spreading diseases, and of being generally undesirable.
The targeting of Haitians resembles in some ways the demonization of Palestinians. Even their scarves, the keffiyeh, have been demonized. Palestinians have been accused of being intrinsically violent, as though it were a gene trait. I have long thought that given that they were kicked out of their own country and have been kept under a brutal occupation, they have responded with a remarkable lack of violence. Even now, as the Israeli military has slaughtered over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the bulk of them women and children, the Palestinians of the West Bank have been long-suffering. Indeed, most of the violence in the Palestinian West Bank has been committed by militant Israel squatters determined to steal Palestinian land.
A lot of the 160,000 Palestinian Americans seem to be professionals and small business people. Some of them have staged protests. The biggest rap against them seems to be that they protested without a permit (a charge that seems oblivious to what “protest” means.)
Palestinians can be killed with impunity because they are not considered human beings. A whole panoply of Israeli leaders have said that there are no innocent Palestinians, which is a genocidal statement. Just switch it around and consider how horrible it would be for someone to say that there are no innocent Jews.
And now, courtesy of rising American fascism, there are no innocent Haitians.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires.” “Engaging the Muslim World” and “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.” He blogs at juancole.com, follow him at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2024
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