It’s Not Just Haitians. Mass Immigration Is Destroying America

After the presidential debate last Tuesday night, J.D. Vance told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins the only reason the media is talking about places like Springfield, Ohio, is because the right turned the cats and geese thing into a meme. He reiterated the point in a hostile interview with Dana Bash on CNN over the weekend, saying these concerns about Haitian immigrants have been brought to him directly by his constituents — concerns the media totally ignored until he and Trump started talking about them.

Vance is right. One of the purposes of a meme is to reveal a deep truth, not to prove a specific claim. In this case, the deep truth is that mass immigration destabilizes and destroys communities, in part by bringing in people who haven’t assimilated to the host country and don’t shares its mores and way of life, which is exactly what’s happening in Springfield and towns like it across America under the Biden-Harris administration. Haitians allegedly slaughtering and eating cats and geese is just a particularly dramatic instance of the phenomenon.

Sure, there’s some evidence that Haitian immigrants in Springfield are stealing and slaughtering animals, mostly from local people speaking out about it on social media. We at The Federalist last week published a police report about a group of Haitians allegedly removing geese from a local park. A second police report has now surfaced, of a woman claiming her cat was stolen and chopped up by her Haitians in her neighborhood. This week, video footage surfaced of a local man conveying similar reports to the city council back in March.

None of this is really all that surprising, given that slaughtering and eating such animals is part of Haitian culture and the dominant vodou religion in Haiti. There’s no reason to think that Haitians, simply by relocating to the U.S., would give all that up, any more than Muslims immigrants would give up Islam.

So the question is, what happens to a community like Springfield, population 60,000, when some 20,000 Haitians suddenly show up? What happens is that it destroys the community and transforms it into something else, decidedly less American.

I don’t mean merely that an influx of unassimilated immigrants from a place like Haiti brings a host of serious social problems and steep costs. Those problems have now been widely reported, from the public schools crowded with non-English-speaking students, to the housing shortage, to the strain on the healthcare system. All these social costs aren’t canceled out by the fact that some of them have gotten jobs at local businesses.

This of course is one of the major leftist and libertarian talking points in the immigration debate, that immigrants grow our economy by doing jobs Americans won’t do or can’t do, and that more immigration just means more prosperity for everyone, regardless of who is coming here or why. 

That’s the view of Gov. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, who last week said the Haitians came to Springfield for jobs, and local employers are happy to have them. He thinks the discussion should end there. As long as they’re working, Haitians are free to pour into any Ohio town they please. This has been the GOP establishment/Chamber of Commerce position on immigration for decades, that people are nothing but economic units and that communities are nothing but GDP. Springfield, goes the thinking, was declining for years until Haitian immigrants came in, increasing jobs and generating wealth for local businesses. Isn’t that what America is all about? Aren’t the Haitians entitled to the American dream like everyone else?

President Joe Biden said as much this week. Incorrectly referring to “Haitian-Americans” in Ohio, he said, “There are those who want a country for some of us, but not for all of us.” It would be hard to imagine a more perfect way to convey the idea of America as a propositional nation. Who is “all of us”? Anyone who sneaks over the border and is later paroled by federal authorities? Everyone who happens to be physically in the United States? The reality is that eventually the idea of America as a propositional nation devolves into this: anyone who manages to get across the Rio Grande is entitled to America, which according to this logic is nothing more than a place to make money — not a homeland, not a nation, and certainly not a people with a shared culture and way of life.

This is a deeply flawed and destructive way to think about America. It supposes that a nation and a people are nothing more than their income, that a community is nothing more than its tax base, and that being an American amounts to nothing more than owning a passport or documents conferring “legal status.”

Under such a conception, there’s no need to ask whether immigrants hail from countries and cultures that are compatible with American social and political norms. All that matters is that they work and generate economic growth once they arrive. How their presence affects the communities where they settle hardly matters.

But it does matter to the native population of such places. Native Springfield residents have complained publicly not just about the aforementioned social costs but also of a lack of basic social norms among the Haitian immigrant community, like not knowing grocery store etiquette, threatening people with machetes, and of course stealing stray cats and grabbing ducks and geese from the local park and eating them.

The corporate media and Washington establishment insist (despite mounting evidence to the contrary) that none of these things are really happening and even mentioning them is racist. Better to shut down the debate than actually argue over whether these problems are the natural consequences of thinking about America as a tax farm, not a homeland for a specific people with a shared history and a common future.

It’s easy to see this reasoning at work in the kind of coverage Springfield has gotten, even from right-of-center media outlets. Writing in The Dispatch, Kevin Williamson recently penned a rather hysterical travelogue of his own recent  and uneventful trip to Springfield, in which he casually compared J.D. Vance to a Nazi. 

As offensive and unfair as that comparison is, the most telling part of Williamson’s essay is where he equated the Haitians of Springfield to “the original New Englanders who settled in the Northwest Territory” and the Scots-Irish and Irish and Germans who came after them. All these groups simply came to Ohio, he says, “in search of jobs in its factories and warehouses.”

Here we have an almost perfect example of the absurd conclusions that come from thinking of America as a mere proposition to which anyone in the world can assent and, just by virtue of physically being here, become an American. It’s a vision of America as a place without any particular religion, language, or customs, just a random assortment of different peoples who came here to make a buck. For men like Williamson, there’s no meaningful difference between the culture of eighteenth-century New England, nineteenth-century Germany and Ireland, and twenty-first century Haiti. After all, he says, the Scots-Irish hillbillies of Ohio once ate possum, so why all this fuss about Haitians eating geese?

This is as disconnected from present-day reality as it is from the facts of history. The peoples of Europe who settled Ohio and the greater Midwest ,whether Irish Catholics or Scottish Presbyterians, brought with them a Christian civilization they shared with earlier generations who settled the Atlantic seaboard. That civilization gave their endeavor in America purpose and shape, and forged a nation and a people on this continent.

The argument here is not that families from Haiti or Venezuela or the farthest reaches of the world cannot become American. Of course they can — and have. But America today is fast losing its common culture, its sense of shared purpose and way of life, the very things that might make it cohere as a nation and be the sort of place that could assimilate new arrivals instead of being Balkanized. This is happening because the Christian religion that bequeathed us our civilization and formed us from the beginning is now disappearing from among us Americans. Without it, we might as well be a tax farm for the global elite, with insular ethnic and religious enclaves across America that sacrifice animals and practice vodou, or support Hamas and Hezbollah, and generally make no effort to become American. We will certainly not be a common people or a nation.

Under these circumstances, it’s clear that America is in no shape to absorb and assimilate large numbers of migrants, legal or illegal, from any corner of the globe, but especially from places whose customs and folkways are so decidedly unlike our own, like Haiti. Those who insist that we do, and oppose all efforts to prevent mass illegal immigration, have reasons and interests of their own, quite apart from what’s best for America and its people.

They are the ones denouncing Vance and Trump as racists for making a meme out of reports of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield. Don’t listen to them. They might hold American citizenship, but they are not really your countrymen. The truth is they have no country at all.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.