Haitians Matter Even If They Aren’t “Legal” or “Hard Workers”
In his first weekly column, Prem Thakker explains why we must defend newcomers on the basis of humanity alone.
Human beings are significant and full of potential and worthy of love, regardless of the labor they provide or whether their simple existence is considered “legal.”
That, however, currently seems too far a notion for some.
As former US President Donald Trump, his running mate JD Vance, and others spread vicious, dehumanizing lies about the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio — that they are eating pets, are vessels harboring disease, are somehow both thieves of jobs and welfare — varying defenses have been offered, mostly by appealing to their hard work and legal status, rather than their being as human as the rest of us.
Some boost on-the-ground reporting, like that from PBS, featuring an interview with a factory owner who assured that Haitian laborers work hard and don’t do drugs. Others praise Republicans like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine for echoing that Haitians are “great workers” and a “boost to the economy,” and that targeted suggestions that Haitians eat pets are “hurtful.”
Well-meaning defenses, grounded in the truth that Haitians and any other community are just as hard-working and contributive to America as every Tom, Dick, and Harry.
The Democratic nominee for president’s first public reaction, meanwhile, was much more superficial, if strategic. During the Sept. 10 debate, Trump’s vicious assertion was heard nationwide: that Haitians are “eating the dogs…eating the cats…eating the pets of the people that live there.”
After ABC’s David Muir challenged the racist lie, Vice President Kamala Harris responded with a chuckle, part of the Democrat’s campaign strategy of ridiculing her rival’s radical and odious notions. “Talk about extreme,” she chuckled, before pivoting to boast of the endorsements she has received from 200 Republicans, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, one of the architects of the Iraq invasion.
Harris on Tuesday appeared in front of a panel at the National Association of Black Journalists and delivered more somber comments, calling the Trump and Vance-led attacks a “crying shame.”
“When you are bestowed with a microphone that is that big, there is a profound responsibility that comes with that,” she said. The public trust “means that you have been invested with trust to be responsible in the way you use your words, much less how you conduct yourself,” she added.
Harris’s comments were oriented less toward defending Haitians and their fundamental humanity, and more focused on Trump and Vance as irresponsible orators.
President Joe Biden meanwhile called the attacks “simply wrong,” having “no place in America,” then adding on Wednesday: "We don't demonize immigrants. We don't single them out for attacks. We don't believe they're poisoning the blood of the country. We're a nation of immigrants and that's why we're so damn strong."
Biden’s comments ought to be the baseline — a foundation not just for a defense of immigrants, but advocacy for them to not be taken as a separate class of human at all. After all, a technical defense based on “legality” only goes so far if people like Vance readily continue arguing that even “legal” immigrants are still “illegal.”
Reject scarcity
Missing in the broader defense of migrants and immigrants is a dispositive case, a reclaiming of the conversation instead of conceding to the right-wing presupposition that newcomers must inherently be justified, rather than welcomed. The assumption of scarcity that the powerful imbue into society, feeding impulses of self-preservation, and more threateningly, racism.
Moreover, judging newcomers’ abilities to assimilate, to be “one of us,” solely by the merits of their labor production and legal status only reifies the notion that we too are only as good as the work we do and the papers we have. By holding immigrants to such an unfeeling standard, we too bring ourselves to mean less than the potential that we hold, the capacities we have to love and feel and share life with others.
Too often, politics is taken to be a rigid landscape. Growing up in an immigrant family in North Dakota, I've seen how political and media spheres both scorn and fetishize communities like my home. The amorphous "Middle America:" a place where everyone is at once naive yet convicted, insular yet to-be-appeased. But my neighbors, like anyone else, were not intrinsically anything — my experiences of the world have been enhanced in knowing them, in the same way theirs have been in knowing me. It does no one justice to bend the world to indulge what we superficially project people to believe. There is no inevitability to our world, and how each of us engage with it. A reckoning with that would help remove ourselves from accepting frameworks just because we are told that is how things are.
And yet it is perhaps unsurprising that common defenses of Haitians — or other attacked communities — are, in actuality, so lukewarm. On the right, politicians indeed thrive off pitting “regular Americans” against their immigrant counterparts, as if there’s any material difference between the two beyond the shape of their names on the pieces of paper that prove they “belong” at all.
Democrats meanwhile have spent the better part of the year rallying around an immigration bill that concedes on conditions many of them have loudly denounced in the past.
The package — insistently lauded by Democrats as “the thing Republicans wanted and then voted against” as some sort-of clever gambit — implies that Democrats themselves agree with Republicans’ underlying premise: that there is an “invasion” of nation-threatening migrants that must be stopped.
Some may counter that Democrats are simply heeding polls, that the American people themselves independently feel immigrants threaten the nation. But people do not live in a hermetically-sealed bubble, totally shielded from political and mediatic rhetoric. We live in a society in which Republicans and corporatists pit people of all groups against each other, and Democrats — out of thickheadedness and fear — concede the terms of debate to those same divisive actors. If Americans are inundated by rhetoric from a majority of the political establishment that there is an immigration crisis, it’s more likely than not they’ll come to believe it.
Embrace possibility
How different would those polls look if Democrats did not simply concede? If the narrative of a “border crisis” was not just dispelled, but challenged with a wholly different message, that there’s no definite cause to see new neighbors with caution in the first place? That any threat to one’s livelihood is not a fellow traveler, but the powerful who seek to engender and exploit division?
An alternative, affirmative counterargument requires stable legs. The liberal defense stands now inadequate. After all, a contradiction is afoot: if newcomers — whether they cross the border or seek asylum or obtain temporary protected status — are welcome after they are here, why such financial and ideological commitment to a violent apparatus to keep them out in the first place? How can human beings be both a “crisis” conceptually before they are in the US, and yet also productive and good neighbors afterwards, in reality?
A stronger counterargument also necessitates both understanding the “real” concerns Americans may have, and absolutely not conceding that newcomers have any inevitable contribution to them. Economic immiseration, social alienation, the sense that this nation does not spend resources on caring for all of its people: these are all reasonable and understandable concerns. Racism is not dispelled by the snap of a finger, but the dehumanization deployed by Trump and Vance in order to conflate these issues with immigration could be more readily slapped away if the counterargument was proactive in rejecting the conflation and advancing a social vision absent these concerns.
It is not enough to defend newcomers to this country as producers, as legal additions: that formula not only (ironically) dehumanizes them, it also degrades our ability to see ourselves as more than what is imposed upon us.
Ultimately, we are called to take to our hearts that we all are non-consensual players in the lottery of existence, subject to permutations of factors beyond our control, landing where we do, and doing the best we can to be, to exist, to live wholly within those outcomes. And feeling that, knowing that someone completely unlike you is only so by sheer raffle, and injecting that into our politics, would do much in defending immigrants not because they’re “like us,” but because they are not.
This is the first of my weekly columns, separate from my regular reporting for Zeteo. We are looking for a name for my column, so please send any suggestions in the comments below.
Only people in the world to fully overthrow the slave masters and liberate themselves. In history.
Then they suffered economic warfare for 150 years for having the audacity to do so.
France and the US should be paying indemnities to Haiti.
The points you made here about reducing people to what they *do v. what they are struck me; I am rethinking how I defend immigrants. I welcome them and learned Spanish so I can communicate with the immigrants I’m in regular contact with. But I need to do more to call out others and you showed me the way. Thank you.