America’s long history of anti-Haitian racism, explained

The US has often singled out Haitian immigrants. GOP attacks are the latest example.

By Li Zhou, Vox —

This past week, Republicans amplified a barrage of strange and racist claims about Haitian immigrants, including falsely suggesting that they’re consuming people’s house pets.

The unfounded attacks came from official party social media accounts, lawmakers, and from both members of the GOP’s presidential ticket. Vice presidential candidate JD Vance said Monday that “Haitian illegal immigrants” are “causing chaos,” while former President Donald Trump emphatically, and falsely, claimed during his Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that, “they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country.”

The comments echo well-worn tropes, and past attempts to tie Haitian immigrants to everything from the spread of illness to upticks in crime.

Republicans have elevated these messages as they seek to make immigration a flashpoint in the November election, capitalizing on voters’ dissatisfaction with current trends. The attacks also come as rampant political instability and gang violence in Haiti has displaced thousands of people — and as the Biden administration has approved temporary protections and humanitarian parole for some new arrivals.

The stereotypes the GOP is harping on, however, have been around for much longer.

In fact, as experts tell Vox, these types of ugly attacks are the byproduct of centuries of anti-Black racism and xenophobic sentiment, which have been used over and over to justify restrictive immigration policies that single out Haitian people. The decision to resurface them in 2024 is, once again, creating a palpably dangerous environment, and adding to this legacy.

“It’s a part of a very old historic pattern,” Regine Jackson, a sociologist and the Dean of Humanities at Morehouse College, told Vox. “It’s the idea that they could do something so inhuman, so un-American. That’s the message underneath, that these people will never be like us.”

Anti-Haitian racism has deep roots

Attacks on Haitian immigrants tap into the longstanding US framing of Haiti as a threat.

“Racism and xenophobia against Haitians among white Americans can be traced all the way back to the Haitian Revolution when Haitians … [overthrew] the system of slavery and [established] the world’s first Black republic,” Carl Lindskoog, the author of a book on the US’s detention of Haitian immigrants, told Vox. “Since then, Haitians have been seen by many white Americans as a threat to white rule and have been treated as such.”

In 1804, Haitians successfully overthrew colonial rule and enslavement by France. Concerned that Haitians’ victory would inspire enslaved people in America to pursue a similar revolution, the US did not recognize Haiti’s independence for nearly six decades.

Following the revolution, France used military force to demand financial restitution for loss of the colony, forcing Haiti to borrow money to cover its demands. The US and France provided those loans — and used them to continue exerting control over Haiti’s finances for years. In total, a New York Times investigation found that reparations to France cost Haiti’s economy $21 billion and directly contributed to poverty and financial problems that still plague the country to this day.

The US also occupied Haiti by force from 1915 to 1934, more than a century after its successful revolution, under the flimsy justification that it was there to ensure political stability following the assassination of multiple Haitian presidents. In reality, it mounted the occupation to prevent France or Germany from gaining ground in the region, which was viewed as strategically valuable. During this time, the US set up a system of forced labor, and sold Haitian land to American corporations.

The takeover also sent a demeaning message: that Haiti wasn’t capable of handling its own affairs.

“A lot of scholars have talked about … rhetoric that’s used to justify invasion around civilizing a society,” says Jamella Gow, a sociologist at Bowdoin University. “This notion of Haitians as backwards, criminal and dangerous started way back then.” The association of Haiti with voodoo practices, something self-help author Marianne Williamson, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2020 and 2024, evoked this week, is another tactic that’s been used to suggest that they’re a “mysterious … migrant other,” says Gow.

In the decades since, the US’s treatment of Haitian immigrants has built on and reinforced these ideas. That was evident in the 1970s, when a wave of Haitian migrants sought asylum in the US as they tried to escape political persecution from US-backed dictator Jean Claude Duvalier. Many of these arrivals were detained and denied asylum, though they met the qualifications for it.

These practices set a precedent for the detention of asylum-seekers, a punitive approach the US still employs now. In a 1980 Haitian Refugee Center v. Civiletti case, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the US government had singled Haitians out and practiced blatant racism in its immigration policies. Despite this decision, then-President Jimmy Carter and his successors managed to find loopholes to keep up this approach. In the years that followed, while a surge of Cuban and Haitian migrants came to the US around the same time, Haitian people were far more likely to stay in detention compared to their Cuban counterparts.

The stigmatization of Haitian immigrants continued, too, in subsequent decades, including efforts to associate Haitians with illnesses, such as HIV. In the early 1980s, when no scientific name had been given to HIV/AIDS, the press and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deemed it the 4H disease — which stood for “Haitians, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Heroin users,” in part because some of the early cases of the illness included Haitian people.

A fear of HIV — and the framing of Haitian immigrants as carriers of disease — was among the reasons that led the US to detain Haitian asylum seekers at Guantanamo Bay during the 1990s. (Thousands were detained and deported, while some who were HIV-positive were threatened with indefinite detention.) That’s part of a long history of the US government deeming immigrants health hazards in order to stymie their entry into the country — a practice that was again embraced during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations used a federal authority known as Title 42 to turn away migrants due to public health concerns during and following pandemic. Haitians were one of the largest groups turned away at the southern border on these grounds, Lindsvoog said.

Other attacks on Haitians were also evident in both administrations, such as when Trump himself referred to Haiti as a “shithole” country, and when border patrol officers were captured riding on horses and using their reins to confront Haitian immigrants under Biden.

These types of attacks have real consequences

In the town of Springfield, Ohio, the latest GOP invective is already doing real-world harm.

On Tuesday, Trump gave the conspiracy its largest platform yet, and since then, the claims about the immigrants, which have been repeatedly debunked, have only spread.

In the wake of all this, Haitian immigrants in Springfield — the town in which the GOP claims the pet eating is taking place — have experienced property damage and are keeping their children home from school out of concerns for safety, the Haitian Times reports.

Springfield’s city hall was also evacuated on Thursday in response to a bomb threat, and two elementary schools were evacuated on Friday due to concerns about public safety. The municipality’s mayor has said he believes both incidents are tied to the claims that have been made about Haitian migrants.

Springfield, a town of roughly 60,000 people in the southwestern part of the state, has found itself in Republican crosshairs due to the changes it’s seen since 2020. About 15,000 Haitian people have moved to Springfield for jobs following a manufacturing boom there, and while the growth in population has helped rejuvenate the town, it’s also put pressure on social services in the form of longer wait times at medical clinics and more competition for affordable housing, fueling some animosity toward the newcomers.

That anger only intensified in 2023, following a school bus accident that killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark, since the driver of the car involved was a Haitian immigrant. Republicans and right-wing figures have since invoked Clark’s death to highlight the threat immigrants pose — something his parents have begged them to stop doing.

This hostility toward Haitian immigrants has resulted in neo-Nazis and Republican lawmakers spreading lies about immigrants eating not just pets, but also ducks from the local parks. There is no evidence of this, Springfield officials have said. One instance of a woman — neither an immigrant nor of Haitian descent — eating a cat took place in Canton, Ohio, which is many miles away.

Tropes about people eating pets aren’t new, and have long been used to demonize immigrant communities in the US, including Asian immigrants. Such stereotypes allow Republicans to paint immigrants, including Haitian people, as “forever foreigners” in a bid to ostracize them. The focus on pets, in particular, is designed to undercut immigrants’ humanity, and to suggest that they could harm something people hold dear, says Jackson.

”This kind of language, this kind of disinformation, is dangerous because there will be people that believe it, no matter how ludicrous and stupid it is, and they might act on that kind of information and act on it in a way where somebody could get hurt. So it needs to stop,” White House spokesperson John Kirby said at a press briefing Tuesday.

Vance downplayed these concerns after Tuesday’s presidential debate when he was asked about his comments by NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor. “What do I think is a bigger problem? Insulting 20,000 people or the fact that my constituents can’t live a good life because Kamala Harris opened the border?” Vance said.

As US history — and the threats Springfield faced this week — makes clear, however, these racist ideas can have a direct influence on policies, and lead to immediate, and dire, consequences.

Source: Vox, republished with permission.

Featured image: People watch as Springfield Police Department officers investigate the Springfield City Hall after bomb threats were made against buildings earlier in the day in Springfield, Ohio, on September 12, 2024. Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images