Yes, Haitians are good enough to be Americans
Yes, Haitians are good enough to be Americans
Why do I even have to type that sentence?
“I was born an American/ I was raised an American/ And I’ll die an American, in America/ With…Armenians!” — Firesign Theatre
I was flying back to the U.S., so I sadly missed the presidential debate on Tuesday. By all accounts, Kamala Harris did quite well, staying cool and collected while Donald Trump burst into his occasional trademark rants. Even Trump’s new surrogate RFK Jr. praised Harris’ debate performance and declared her the winner.
There were a number of trademark Trump moments, such as when he declared that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison”. But perhaps the most iconic moment was when Trump launched into a bizarre rant about immigrants eating dogs, cats, and other pets in Ohio:
The audience probably had little idea what Trump was talking about, but people who spend too much time online (like myself) knew exactly where it came from. It was a reference to a claim made by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, just the day before, about a town called Springfield, Ohio:
Vance subsequently repeated his claim, and it went viral on X. Even the normally hapless Ted Cruz went viral when he posted a meme of cats begging people to vote for Trump “so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us”.
There was just one problem: The claims appeared to be entirely made up.
News organizations immediately started calling up businesspeople, police, and government officials from Springfield, asking for reports of pet-devouring Haitians. There were no such reports. When pressed, the best that any of the online rightists who repeated the claim could come up with was a photo in Columbus of a (non-Haitian) man carrying a dead goose, and a video of a mentally disturbed (non-Haitian) woman from another town in Ohio attempting to eat a cat. No one could come up with a single credible account of a Haitian pet-eating incident, or any immigrant pet-eating incident, especially one in Springfield, OH.
So where did the story come from? As far as anyone can tell, the story originated with various fringe right-wing activists. One pseudonymous poster on X, who says he supports “eugenics and sterilization just like Hitler”, claims to be the origin of the story, after contacting Springfield residents privately on Facebook. Another man, identified as the leader of a neo-Nazi group, made the claims in a town hall meeting near Springfield a few days earlier.
When news crews went out to Springfield, they found a very different story:
Springfield’s story is typical — a small post-industrial Midwestern city that all the young people are moving away from, whose businesses have tried recruiting immigrants to make up for the lack of local workers. If you want to read a good book about towns like this, I strongly recommend J. Celeste Lay’s A Midwestern Mosaic.
As is common throughout American history, the workers ended up being mostly from one country, thanks to word-of-mouth reports from the first people who went there. Although plenty of rightists called the Haitians “illegals”, most of them were brought to Springfield legally, through a guest worker program called “Temporary Protected Status”.
Obviously when 15,000 Haitians show up in a Midwestern town of 60,000 people, there are going to be tensions. But like most Midwestern towns, Springfield is handling the influx well. The CEO of Springfield manufacturing company McGregor Metal praised his new Haitian employees for their sobriety and work ethic, saying:
I wish I had 30 more. Our Haitians come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. That’s a stark difference from what we’re used to in our community.
Meanwhile, a local Baptist church that had been steadily losing parishioners for years is suddenly filling its pews again, since many Haitians are devoutly Christian.
Rightists seemed baffled when confronted with this reality. A right-wing podcaster posted clips from Springfield of a few residents saying nasty things about Haitians, including one hurling a racial slur at passers-by, but couldn’t come up with anything more credible. JD Vance stubbornly doubled down on the claim, and somewhat awkwardly called on his “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing”:
More reasonable conservatives, however, realized that allowing a fake rumor started by neo-Nazis to make its way into Trump’s debate performance might not have been the best idea:
Sounds like good advice to me.
Haitian immigrants are fine, actually
In fact, positive stories like the ones PBS found in Springfield are the norm rather than the exception when it comes to Haitian immigrants in the United States.
Haiti itself is a desperately poor and horrifically violent country. Rightists would have us believe that this poverty and violence is due to characteristics — cultural and/or innate — of the Haitian people themselves. Trump famously referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, citing this as a reason not to want Haitian immigrants. It’s a central conceit of rightist immigration restrictionism that immigrants will make America more like their country of origin.
And yet when we look at how Haitians actually do in the U.S., that story seems to fall apart. For example, although Haitian immigrants tend to be less educated than Americans, their children tend to be more educated than the general population:
Their poverty rates are average, and their unemployment rates are low:
(A lot of the 28% of Haitian immigrants who aren’t in the labor force are going to be housewives; you can see how this percentage drops a lot after the first generation.)
Haitians’ incarceration rates are also low. For Haitians who immigrated legally — like the ones in Springfield, Ohio — the rate of incarceration is even lower than the average for all legal immigrants:
Some Haitians come to America with money.1 But even those who don’t show up with cash tend to make it into the American middle class. Poor Haitians tend not to be as upwardly mobile as most immigrants, but they still do about as well as the average American:
Haitian success in America, like all immigrant success, is due in part to the selectivity of America’s immigration system. If you have the money, the brains, the discipline, the personal initiative, and/or the risk tolerance to get out of Haiti, you’re probably unusually likely to do well no matter where you go.
But selectivity operates less for Haiti than for other groups, because Haiti is closer to America (making it easier to come) and has a very small population to select from. The fact that Haitians in America still do fine is proof that Haitians, as a group, are not the kind of people you’d want to keep out of your country.
What’s crazy is the fact that I actually have to type that sentence.
Stop looking for a group of people who aren’t good enough
Call me a crazy idealist, but I believe that merit should be decided based on individual characteristics, not what ethnic group someone belongs to. If I’m Haitian, I should never have to point to aggregate statistics like the ones in the previous section, just to prove that a Haitian can become a good American. I should never have to cite the names of famous Haitians like Basquiat or Wyclef Jean to prove that I’m not from a race of useless people. It should merely be assumed that I am an individual human being, and that my accomplishments, my strengths, and my potential stand on their own.
I realize that a whole lot of people don’t think this way. The notion that human beings have merit not as individuals but as appendages of a group is common in American history, as everywhere else. It’s most commonly associated with eugenics and the right, but there are plenty of examples of this on the identitarian left as well — remember the Stanford lecturer who labeled some of his students as “colonizers” based on their ancestry, or the DEI training materials that label individualism, work ethic, punctuality, rationality, and other positive traits as part of “whiteness”.
Immigrants tend to bear the brunt of group judgements. Here’s how Francis A. Walker, the president of MIT, argued against immigration back in 1896:
The entrance into our political, social, and industrial life of such vast masses of peasantry…is a matter which no intelligent patriot can look upon without the gravest apprehension and alarm. These people have no history behind them which is of a nature to give encouragement. They have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which made it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of the olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self-care and self-government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains…
Their habits of life, again, are of the most revolting kind. Read the description given by Mr. Riis of the police driving from the garbage dumps the miserable beings who try to burrow in those depths of unutterable filth and slime in order that they may eat and sleep there! Was it in cement like this that the foundations of our republic were laid?…
The problems which so sternly confront us to-day are serious enough without being complicated and aggravated by the addition of some millions of Hungarians, Bohemians, Poles, south Italians, and Russian Jews.
There is no perceptible difference between what Walker wrote 129 years ago, and what JD Vance, Donald Trump, and a horde of online rightists are saying about modern immigrants. The rhetoric is the same; only the targets have changed.
In fact, the targets constantly shift. Before Vance was talking about Haitians, he was talking about Somalis. Trump’s “shithole countries” comment was meant to include El Salvador and the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. Before that it was Muslims — recall that in 2016, Trump promised a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S. And before that it was Mexicans.
What the rightists are doing here is looking for a foothold. They want to find one particular nationality or ethnicity for which a majority of Americans are willing to say “OK, OK. Those guys are just trash. We can keep those guys out completely.”
Once they’ve found that one group you’re willing to exclude, they’ve made you accept their basic framing — that people’s worth as immigrants should be judged by their group rather than their individual characteristics. Far more important than which groups get the nod and which get rejected is the idea that immigrants are to be judged based on their groups in the first place. This idea was the basis of the 1924 immigration law that Trump’s allies often praise.
Once that principle is settled — once the first group has been categorically excluded — then the anti-immigration people can just ratchet it up. Suppose you’re willing to ban Haitians. Why not Somalis? OK, now why not Angolans? OK, now why not Hondurans? Etc. etc.
And where does it stop? Surely the Italians and the Irish are safe, having long ago assimilated into the American mainstream…right? Well, maybe. But JD Vance did say this, when he was asked about mass deportation:
Vance was asked by a reporter if mass deportations would address crime, apparently referencing remarks he made about “ethnic enclaves” in a 2021 interview.
“You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish, and German immigration right? And that had its problems, its consequences,” Vance said in an interview in 2021 when he was running for Senate. “You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict.”
I suppose that because Italian and Irish neighborhoods are safer now, Vance and his movement wouldn’t ever turn their baleful eye toward those folks, after the Haitians and the Somalis have all been dealt with…right? Probably not. Anyway, better be on your best behavior.
My feeling is that the rightists are overplaying their hand here. They’ve seen all the polls showing that Americans are angry about the uncontrolled flood of asylum seekers pouring over the southern border, and they’ve decided that this is their time. All these years the rightists have been roaring that the blood of the nation is being polluted, and now, it seems, the nation is finally ready to admit they were right.
Except I don’t think that’s going to happen. Yes, Americans are mad about the asylum seekers. Yes, Biden made a huge mistake by waiting two years too long to crack down. But Trump and his supporters seem to be forgetting what happened to American opinion on immigration during his first term in office:
Americans don’t like border chaos. They demand to know that the country — and by extension, the democratic will of the American people — has control over who gets in and who doesn’t. But at the same time, Americans love immigration and immigrants in general. Overall attitudes toward immigration and immigrants pretty much never goes into negative territory:
As soon as the frame switches back from “controlling the border” to “deciding who gets to be a real American based on their ethnicity”, you will see the numbers start to turn again.
The correct framing for immigration — the one the American people will accept over the long term — is an individualist one, not one based on group judgements. Don’t give asylum hearings to individuals who cross the border illegally. When expanding immigration, recruit individuals based on their ability to contribute to the economy, either at the elite level or as regular workers like the Haitians at McGregor Metal. Judge immigrants’ behavior entirely by how they act as individuals, not by how their “community” gets stereotyped.
Nations are, for better or for worse, exclusive clubs. The ability to move freely across borders is not a human right. But when it comes to the exclusive club that is the United States of America, your ethnicity shouldn’t be a factor in whether you’re allowed past the door.
One time in NYC I went to a party with a bunch of rich Haitian finance and real estate folks. I accidentally tore a hole in a girl’s fancy dress by grabbing a hanging thread just as she moved her arm to the side. Her response was to shrug and say “It’s OK, I’ll just buy a new one.”
As a Haitian, thank you, Noah.
I generally tend to bristle when I hear Democrat-leaning friends say things like "Republicans are racist" or "Trump is racist", because 99% of the time the evidence for that is super weak or slanted. But in this instance, I'm pretty appalled at how gross (and frankly, un-American) these comments are.