I must have been a teenager before I realized some of the people I knew would regularly make derogatory comments about Haitians. My family moved away from the Dominican Republic when I was a child, but we returned every year to visit friends and relatives.
During one visit, I vividly recall a building under construction collapsing. “It’s because the people working on it were Haitans,” I heard someone say. A family member told me an off-color joke once, and the punchline compared Haitians to monkeys. I didn’t know what to say. I was young, but I knew it was wrong. I didn’t laugh then, and I’m not laughing now.
During a national presidential debate last week, Donald J. Trump said Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The moderators of the debate informed the former president that the Springfield city manager received no credible evidence of such a claim. Mr. Trump said he had seen it on television.
There are thousands of Haitians in Springfield, and a woman in Ohio apparently did eat someone’s cat. But she is not Haitian and she is not in Springfield. The Haitians in that city are also not undocumented immigrants. They have permission to be in this country.
It is racist and xenophobic to believe without evidence that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets. The willingness to lump together a mishmash of online stories and social media posts reveals the extent to which our rhetoric has undercut American perception of immigrants’ inherent dignity.
I am ashamed to say it, but it reminds me so much of the way Haitians are treated in my home country. In 2013, for example, the Dominican Constitutional Court retroactively stripped Dominican nationality from anyone who did not have at least one parent of Dominican ancestry. The ruling affected as many as 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian ancestry.
But anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic started long ago. Raphael Trujillo, a ruthless dictator, came into power in 1930. Trujillo commanded Dominican historians at the time to write inaccurate depictions of Haitians, José Guerrero, a professor at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, told me in an interview earlier this year. They were blamed for a poor economy and seen as a threat to national identity.
The Dominican National Guard, at Trujillo’s order, executed as many as 25,000 Haitians living in the country in 1937. The press, which Trujillo controlled, reported that Haitians were stealing cattle in the border region and that it had been rural Dominicans who killed them.
While I spent a lot of time on the island growing up, I did not visit Haiti until I was an adult. In 2010, I made a reporting trip there with Catholic Relief Services to cover the aftermath of a 7.0-magnitude earthquake that claimed more than 300,000 lives there. It was one of the most formative reporting experiences of my life.
As if it were yesterday, I remember seeing a man in Port-au-Prince walk out of his cinder block home and wash his face with water from the gutter. From our vehicle, I saw a young boy waist-deep in water picking through the garbage in a canal. I met a woman whose home was flooded when the earthquake broke water pipes in the surrounding area. I can still smell the overpowering stench of sewage when she brought us to see her home.
That was 15 years ago, but Haiti is in no better condition today. It has suffered through a cholera epidemic, more earthquakes and hurricanes. In 2021, President Jovenel Moïses was assassinated, and in recent years gang violence has beset the nation.
These ongoing struggles have led to a constant flux of Haitians fleeing to other countries, including neighboring Dominican Republic. I covered that trend while on a trip with Cross Catholic Outreach, during which I met the Rev. Mike Seis. A Wisconsin native, Father Seis heads both Catholic Charities and Fundasep, the social outreach arm of the Diocese of San Juan de la Managua, which borders Haiti.
“When we talk about migrants in our communities, I say, ‘You know, in the church, there’s no nationality. In the church, we’re all one,’” Father Seis told me, though he explained that Haitians in the area tend to be evangelical Christians. “When people come to church, we don’t ask for a passport. I put it in simple terms. All of us belong to God’s family.”
In 2016, I reported on Haitians who arrived at the southern border from Brazil. Thousands had migrated there to help build structures for the World Cup and the Olympics. Once the work ran out, the Haitian immigrants made their way north.
“You have to sleep on the street,” Jacques Mitchel told me of living in Tijuana at the time. It took him a month to get to the U.S.-Mexico border from Brazil. Like so many migrants I’ve met, he said simply, “We have come to work.”
The constant tribulations that besiege Haiti cloud the nation’s rich history. In 1804, Haiti became the second republic in the Western Hemisphere. Toussaint L’Ouverture, a freed enslaved person, challenged Napoleon and instigated the Haitian Revolution, winning the Caribbean nation’s independence from France.
Under French rule and at the hands of enslaved persons, the land produced cotton, coffee and sugar cane. It was France’s richest colony. In 1825, France sent warships to Port-au-Prince to force Haiti to compensate French colonists for the loss of land and enslaved laborers. Haiti did not pay off this debt until 1947. Coups and dictators in subsequent decades drove the nation into an economic quagmire from which it has yet to recover.
After the 2010 earthquake, the United States granted Haitians Temporary Protected Status, which the Department of Homeland Security confers to individuals whose home countries are suffering from ongoing conflict, environmental disasters or other unsafe conditions. The status protects them from deportation.
In 2016, the Obama administration attempted to end T.P.S. for Haitian immigrants. In 2017, the Trump administration attempted to do the same. The Biden administration, on the other hand, extended T.P.S. for Haitians this summer. Now, an estimated 500,000 Haitians in the United States have this protection.
That’s a lot of people, and it is understandable why small communities like Springfield are overwhelmed. But for now, Haiti cannot welcome these immigrants back. In the meantime, the United States can and should make room for them. A good first step would be to stop accusing our new neighbors of eating our pets.
