Hello, Would You Like To Know Why We Have These Haitian Immigrants In The First Place?

It's Learn A Thing Sunday!

Sep 22, 2024

We have spent the last few weeks trying to tamp down the flow of ridiculous misinformation about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. So much time, really, that we haven’t actually spent all that much time discussing why there are so many Haitian immigrants in Springfield in the first place. This is not entirely surprising. When discussing immigration, we very rarely discuss why immigrants are coming over here in any realistic, accurate way — and we certainly don’t talk about any role that we may have played in that story arc.

We already know that they are here legally. We know that they are in Springfield, specifically, because businesses in Springfield didn’t have enough workers and wanted them to come there. We know that this has led to an economic revitalization of the city, as well as some problems that have nothing to do at all with anyone eating anyone’s pets. Even Republican Governor Mike DeWine has taken to the pages of the New York Times to shout that from the rooftops.

If we’re going to talk about Haitian immigrants, however, what we really need to talk about is the the fact that many of the ongoing issues in Haiti stem directly from imperialism and US interventionism, going back actual centuries.

Haiti was the first established Black republic, tossing out the French following a successful slave revolt in 1805. Good for them! Right? Well, yes, but that also meant that no countries (including us) would trade or do business with them in any way, both because racism and because they (and we) didn’t want their (and our) own slaves getting any ideas about things. This, naturally, led to some pretty serious poverty issues!

Once Haiti was free and independent, the French were like “OK, well, we guess it’s fine that we don’t get to own you anymore but that means you owe us reparations, because now we can’t make money off of you and your nation’s natural resources!” and forced the small nation to pay them the equivalent of about 560 million American dollars today. Being a small, poor nation whose natural resources were simultaneously being plundered by the United States, they did not pay it in full until 1947.

Oh! And also they didn’t get to be free and independent for all of that time, either! Fearing the possibility of German influence on Haiti, Woodrow Wilson instructed the United States Marines to invade the island nation in 1915. The United States then occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 during which time it did the usual things — enslave people, rule through martial law, appoint puppet governments, kill anyone who resisted, expropriate their national bank over to Citibank, bring in US sugar companies to the Dominican Republic (which we occupied from 1916 to 1924), put Haitians to work there for very low pay, and create and train the Gendarmerie (security force). At least 15,000 Haitians were killed in combat during the US occupation, while 5,500 died in the forced labor camps.

Following the occupation, there was a succession of heads of state, and in 1957, they elected Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. Duvalier, as you likely know, was a deeply corrupt brutal dictator known largely for deploying his secret police — the Tonton Macoute, rumored to have been trained by the US Marines — against his political enemies. The US went kind of on-and-off with him; Kennedy was skeeved out by the whole “totalitarian dictator” thing and offered some support to opposition forces, but ultimately he was embraced by US leaders as a necessary “bulwark against communism.” The same was true of the regime of his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, until he was ultimately overthrown in 1986.

Then, in 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president since before Duvalier, made the mistake of suggesting that France should maybe pay them $21,685,135,571.48 in restitution (a figure the New York Times estimated was actually at the lower range of what the actual cost of the damage to the Haitian economy was as a result of the payments), which France very much did not want to do. Aristide also wanted to raise the minimum wage for the workers making American clothes and to increase spending on education and healthcare, which the United States really didn’t like.

So when some right-wing paramilitary group decided that they should be in charge instead, Aristide got mysteriously whisked away on a plane by US forces under President George W. Bush; the US forces conveniently helped him sign a document announcing his resignation. Aristide describes this as having been kidnapped and then offered a choice between signing or being shot, all of which the US has denied.

Things were not great before the coup, but they’ve been significantly worse since then, getting even worse after the earthquakes that devastated the nation and killed 85,000 to 316,000 people (depending on whom you ask) in 2010 and the cholera outbreak caused by the UN workers who came to help after the earthquake, which killed approximately 10,000 people … and then even worse after that.

Via Responsible Statecraft:

Haiti’s last elections were in 2016, and parliament has not held votes since 2019. There has been no president since July 2021, when then-President Jovenel Moise, who had stayed in office five months past the end of his term, was assassinated. Haiti is led by a de facto prime minister, Ariel Henry, who was chosen not by Haitians but by the Core Group, a group of mostly majority-white countries led by the United States. Henry’s reign is unconstitutional and faces widespread Haitian opposition. But with the United States propping him up, Henry has been able to serve a longer term than any prime minister in at least 40 years. […]
Meanwhile Haitians face intolerable conditions. Gangs control much of the country, including an estimated 80% of the capital, Port-au-Prince. The economy has had both zero growth and inflation over 15% for three years straight. Children face unprecedented levels of wasting hunger. To spare themselves and their families from this nightmare, hundreds of thousands of Haitians have made the desperate voyage out of Haiti, often arriving at the U.S. border.

I’m also going to point out here that the gangs in Haiti are not so much what we think of when we think of gangs, but are instead largely made up of former military and police officers, often associated with the leadership of the country.

We are not exclusively to blame for Haiti’s situation, but we are responsible for a whole lot of it. We pursued our own interests in the country without regard to what happened to those who actually lived there, and that isn’t something that comes without consequences.

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There is a pattern here! A very, very obvious pattern. A powerful, wealthy nation or group of people brutally occupies/exploits a poorer nation/group of people and then, when things go wrong in some way, declares that all of the problems of that nation/group of people are due to the fact that they are intrinsically bad.

This is perhaps best illustrated by an historical situation that lives rent-free in my head. In the 1800s, after the unification of Italy, the south of Italy (which had always been more agrarian and poor to begin with) had been devastated by war and was now even poorer than they had been before. There was a lot of crime, both of necessity and rebellion. And the father of criminology (and an incredible racist) Cesare Lombroso, he looked down and thought to himself “Gee! What could be causing all of this crime? Is it poverty? Is it that they were just crushed in a war? Is it lack of opportunity? NOPE. It’s the shape of their heads. They all have criminal head shapes in the south. It’s so obvious!”

As ridiculous as that sounds, it’s a refrain that never ends. It’s the occupy/exploit/brutalize to “there’s just something intrinsically wrong with them” to “and therefore anything we did or do now is justified” pipeline. This time, it’s not criminal head shapes, it’s “They’re going to eat your cats! Because they’re the kind of people who eat cats! They’re bad and we are justified in our hatred!”

We fucked with practically every nation in Latin America. We deposed their leaders when we didn’t like them and replaced them with dictators who would be friendly to us. We trained death squads to keep them in line. We used them for cheap (or free) labor. We depleted their natural resources. We don’t get to be surprised that they are now coming here to escape that. The real lesson here is that treating people decently and kindly is its own reward, and oppression, discrimination and cruelty will never, ever produce a positive, consequence-free outcome for either party.

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