Introduction

Anti-Haitian rhetoric, grounded in anti-Black immigrant racism, may not be the exception but the rule in American public discourse and public policy (Garver, 2024; Kosman, 2021). The most recent example of this perennial legacy of American demonization of the Black marginalized other came into full view in the 2024 presidential election cycle. This spectacular demonization was weaponized by former President and presidential candidate Donald Trump, who angrily and falsely claimed that new Haitian migrants to the Town of Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating the dogs and cats of its Residents (Akim & Ingram, 2024). The fearmongering against Black and other ethnically diverse immigrants eating pets and other exotic foods is a racially charged stereotype dating back to the early 19th century, following different immigration waves to the United States (Garsd, 2024). Donald Trump’s rhetoric is only a continuation of the vitriol he has meted out against Haitians and other Black immigrant groups. In January 2018, Trump quipped that the United States should not be welcoming immigrants from “shithole countries” like Haiti and Nigeria, instead preferring immigrants from Norway and Europe (Mc Cluskey, 2019).

What Donald Trump neglected to acknowledge about this sub-demographic of Haitian migrants is that they are in the United States legally, under the Temporary Protected Status designation (Bernal, 2021), which grants Haitian nationals and other vulnerable immigrant groups the right to live and work in the United States. The current TPS provisions were belatedly granted to Haitian migrants by the current Biden administration after much advocacy from immigrant rights groups (Denuyl, 2021). However, Trump’s full-throated nativist racism did not end on the debate stage. It soon spread like wildfire in the digital public sphere, with his Republican counterparts leading the way in amplifying the viral neo-Nazi conspiracy theory that Haitians were stealing and eating the pets of native-born, mostly White American citizens (Lawrence & Toropin, 2024; Milliheser, 2024). Trump’s symbiosis with the American Neo-Nazi movement is well documented and came into complete focus when he famously quipped that there were fine people on both sides following the deadly Charlottesville, Virginia protests in 2021, which involved clashes between Neo-Nazi activists and members of the community opposed to their protests (Gray, 2017). This article will serve as an ideological criticism of anti-Haitian racism and bigotry in the United States. The racist framing of eating animals is a reproduction of the othering, exotification, scapegoating, and demonization of a uniquely vulnerable immigrant population.

Historic Origins of Haitian Demonization

The vulnerability of the Haitian migrant is rooted in centuries of anti-Haitian racism and the violent, systemic punishment of a country that dared to challenge its material condition as one of the biggest and most oppressive hubs of French colonialism and slavery in the occupied new world (Ray-Ellis, 2023). The framing is also grounded in decades of anti-Black racism directed specifically toward Black immigrants that other immigrant groups are not subjected to (Denuyl, 2022). Haiti’s value as a French colony was laid bare in Frances’s reaction to the country’s historically successful Black Revolution, which not only expunged them out of the newly established republic but also caused France to demand reparations from Haiti in the sum of 150 million Francs in 1825, or 21 billion US dollars in 2023 when adjusted for inflation (Obregon, 2018; Oosterlinck et al., 2022). The irony of a former colonial power demanding reparations from those it enslaved and profited from is probably one of the most significant contradictions in colonial history. Most, if not all, formerly colonized countries in the Western hemisphere were never compensated for the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas or the enslavement of Africans, whose enforced labor built the modern and wealthy nation-states of Europe and North America, respectively. The centuries-old demonization of Haiti conceals the rich anti-colonial legacy of a people who not only became the first Black, accessible, and independent state in the world but a nation-state that was only the second in the Western hemisphere to win its battle-tested fight for Independence emancipation, and self-determination from a formidable colonial foe. (Ray-Ellis, 2023). Placing Haitian identity on the periphery also repudiates Haiti’s contribution to the American War of Independence against the British (Gibson, 2020).

Anti-Immigrant Racism in Electoral Politics and Government Policy

The 2024 election cycle has once again opened the floodgates of prejudice, racism, xenophobia, and nativism against the Black and Brown migrants seeking refuge in the United States (Gramlich, 2024; Treyger & Culberston, 2024; CPB, 2024). While the number of migrants seeking asylum reached an unprecedented level of 3.2 million in 2023 (Gramlich, 2024; Treyger & Culberston, 2024; CPB, 2024), the plight of the Haitian migrants struck a chord in the imagination and psyche of people of African descent in the United States and the America’s, following reporting about their living conditions under the Del Rio International bridge on the US-Mexico Border (Hackman, 2021). Not only were their vulnerabilities exposed, but images of White American immigration enforcement officers on horseback whipping desperate and vulnerable Haitian migrants conjured up painful reminders of the treatment of the enslaved Africans during the holocaust of slavery (Kosman, 2021).

The whip can be a powerful and dark metaphor for the centuries-long whipping of Haiti into submission by the neoliberal forces of American and French imperialism. The dogs and cat trope, therefore, builds on the anti-Haitian attitudes long actualized in the United States, not only as a matter of rhetoric but also as a matter of policy. Some historians argue that the American destabilization of Haiti, starting with its occupation in 1915, was grounded in deeply held anti-Black prejudice. Fatton, as cited in St. Jacques as Sommers (2015), said, “Haiti, in the US imagination, was basically an African country, and thus peopled by an inferior, savage, and backward-looking race (St Jacques & Sommers, 2015, p. 15). They further opine, “In the eyes of the occupiers, Haitians were also a bizarre mixture of African and Latin cultures, which people in the United States understood as deceitful, arrogant, and undisciplined” (St. Jacques & Sommers, 2015, p. 17).

Stereotyping the Immigrant Outsider

This racist worldview is consistent with the reproduction of a Western hegemonic worldview that has historically scapegoated, othered, exoticized, and criminalized non-White people and non-White cultures for centuries and now continues apace in the newly constituted digital spaces of the 21st century. Stuart Hall posited the role of stereotyping as an instrument of division between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal’ in his spectacle of the other. He states, “It sets up a symbolic frontier between the ‘normal’ and the ‘deviant,’ the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological,’ the ‘acceptable’ and the ‘unacceptable,’ what ‘belongs’ and what ‘does not,’ ‘Other,’ between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ Us and Them” (Hall, 1997, p. 258). As a matter of policy, the United States initial relationship with Haiti as an occupying power between 1915 and 1934 further marginalized and destabilized an already fractured society (Fatton, 2006; Bellgrade-Smith et al., 2015). The American occupation not only presided over the mass murder of thousands of Haitians at the hands of US Marines (Fatton, 2021), but it also presided over the wholesale transfer of Haitian financial reserves from Port au Prince to New York (Hudson, 2013). This wealth transfer under duress was the second largest wealth transfer from the first Black Republic, following France’s extortionist reparations demands as a result of the loss of its “human property” in the 17th century.

Further, the longest occupation in the Western hemisphere was undergirded by the Wilson doctrine of President Woodrow Wilson, through a “civilizing” big stick approach meant to keep the Caribbean at bay (Higman, 2017). Wilson’s early 20th-century militarism in the Western hemisphere was only one in a panoply of other imperialist edicts by the United States to assert its dominance in the region. The others included Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine (Gilderhus, 2016; Mc Cullough, 2016). The American occupation was also financed by a predatory private sector whose vested interest was in the bourgeois class of Haiti and not the citizens (Hudson, 2013). In essence, this sinister form of predatory capitalism formed the building blocks for the neoliberal economic order that is the common practice of overseas American capitalism in the 21st century (Du Bois, 2012). Fatton Jr. stated that while the American occupation set up some form of central government infrastructure, it was not a sustainable proposition for the long-term stability of Haiti (Fatton, 2006). The proceeding historical context, therefore, sets up why Haiti’s economic woes have led to the perennial issue of the mass migration of Haitians from a country devastated by different waves of colonialization and racism. The early 20th-century context also does not take into account the historical debt that Haiti was forced to pay to France for having the temerity to end enslavement and declare Independence.

Racially Biased Immigrant Processing

One of the legacies of the American occupation of both Cuba and Haiti can be found in the movement of its people by boat from destabilized societies, where basic living became untenable. While the United States instituted a policy of welcoming Cuban migrants through the Wet Feet Dry Feet policy (Perez, 2004), the Haitians were not subjected to the privilege of a similar policy (Shemack, 2010). Shemack adds, “Between 50,000 and 70,000 Haitian boat people arrived in Miami between 1977 and 1981; instead of being granted refugee status, most were placed in detention centers and eventually deported” (Shemak, 2010, p. 50) Additionally, Shemak, quoting Masud-Piloto noted that the mass exclusion of Haitians was juxtaposed against the backdrop of the wholesale welcoming 125,000 Cuban migrants who arrived by way of the Mariel boat lift in 1980 (Shemak, 2010).

While Guantanamo Bay is synonymous with being a prison for what the US called high-value 9/11 terrorist detainees, it was also a holding cell for thousands of Haitian migrants who were denied the due process of an asylum claim before being deported to Haiti (Denuyl, 2022; April 2010). This bias in US immigration law has been maintained by every single US administration since the 1980s, reflecting the bi-partisan bias Haitians have had to confront, irrespective of the pro-immigrant rhetoric posited by the center-left Democratic party and administration. Denuyl posits, “The Biden administration carried over some of the harmful policies inflicted by the Trump administration on Haitian and African immigrants. For example, Biden was exceedingly slow to reinstate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti, a program which had protected some 59,000 Haitians from deportation due to violence and civil unrest in Haiti” (Denuyl, 2023, p. 759) Further, Haitian immigrants rights groups in the United States berated the Biden administration in 2021 for the unprecedented deportation of hundreds of Haitian migrants on more than 24 “death flights” that were carried out during the celebration of America’s Black history month (Denuyl, 2022).

The racially skewed enforcement of US immigration law is also rooted in America’s historically racist framing of Haiti as uncivilized, diseased, and dark. When the Marines occupied Haiti in the early 20th century, their stereotypical framing of the Haitian people and its culture became an institutionalized vision of America’s perception of an oppressed people decades thereafter (Renda, 2001). Some legal experts and immigration advocates, having conducted systematic reviews of America’s immigrant enforcement and processing system, have also found that immigrants of African descent, regardless of ethnic origin, experience anti-Blackness in the immigration system (Denuyl, 2021; Guenther et al., 2011; Carbado, 2005). This bias is reflected in the disproportionate denial of asylum claims from Black immigrant asylum seekers and higher rates of Black deportations as compared to White immigrants (Denuyl, 2021).

The proceeding examination of anti-immigrant American rhetoric and policy brings to full view the historic and deeply entrenched nature of anti–Black racism against Haitian immigrants in the United States. The paradox of American immigrant rhetoric is that while it aspires to welcome the tired, poor, and huddled masses yearning to breathe free, as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, some significant terms and conditions apply. These terms and conditions, written in bold print, establish a clear demarcation line between which immigrants are desirable and who are not. The latest cats and dogs’ vitriol is also a direct contradiction of America’s vision of assimilationism, which is hindered by Federal immigration law, nativist fears of the Black immigrant, prejudice, and stereotyping. The scapegoating and demonization of the vulnerable immigrant in an era of economic uncertainty serve to blame the migrant for usurping economic resources away from poor, middle-and working-class Americans. The rhetoric of blaming the immigrant, therefore, serves to continue America’s legacy of using the vulnerable as a distraction and deflection from the economic policies enacted that hurt working- and middle-class families.

Despite the racially charged anger directed at Haitian migrants, they have managed to rise above the noise in a demonstration of battle-tested resilience to prove their detractors wrong. Haitians authorized to work in the United States have demonstrated that they are neither lazy nor leeches since they occupy the sixth largest share of healthcare workforce participation among five other immigrant groups and also participate in the labor force at a similar rate as all immigrants (Dian & Batalova, 2024).

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