Haitians in Florida, Reacting to Events at Springfield, Ohio, Swinging Against Trump Ticket

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That story about Haitian immigrants at Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, having gone viral for a week on the internet, could have an impact on the upcoming presidential election, which is currently polling as essentially tied.

The hearsay holds that Haitians at Springfield — population about 60,000, with a third of the population being Haitian immigrants — have stolen pets for consumption. Also, hearsay has it, ducks in certain parks have not been spared, as their aggressors chopped off their heads and disappeared with them.

Forget that the police at Springfield stated they have received no complaints about cat-eating Haitians. Senator Vance, President Trump’s vice-presidential pick, has entered the fray. He’s pointing out that the Haitians are causing havoc at Springfield. One was in an accident with a school bus, causing the death of an 11-year-old schoolboy and injuries to several others.

Senator Cruz seized on the situation at Springfield to criticize President Biden’s policy on immigration, pointing out that he’s flooded the country with criminals. Then, on Tuesday night, right at the outset of the presidential debate, Trump mentioned Springfield, Ohio, without citing what happened there.

In other words, the story of the cat-eating Haitians was meant as a smear on immigrants in general, castigated as criminals flooding the country, because of the policy of Mr. Biden and Vice President Harris. The name Springfield has become a coded message for illegal immigrants and Ms. Harris, Trump’s competitor for the presidency, who is presented as coddling the criminals.

The thing to keep in mind is the backstory, which I have been covering in my decades as proprietor of the Haiti-Observateur newspaper and as, for some years, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington. This is a backstory of hard-working Haitian immigrants, who began arriving in America in recent decades and have been a boon wherever they settled.

At Springfield in the last two decades, Haitians have helped reenergize the town as a manufacturing hub, connected to the nearby Dayton and Columbus markets. At the same time, the presence of so many Blacks in a region, which was mainly populated by whites, had led the immigrants to be targeted as spoilers.

Yet even from the beginning of America, Haitians have helped our country — from even before the Caribbean nation gained independence in 1804. It was the second independent country in the Western Hemisphere, second only to America itself.

The “Chasseurs Volontaires,” the military group that fought, for American Independence in 1779 at Savannah, under the leadership of French generals, were the precursors of Haitians. In October 2007, a memorial statue was unveiled at Savannah, recognizing the role they played in America’s war for independence.

In the 1990s, Haitians were targeted by the Food and Drug Administration as carriers of HIV to America. Haitians were lumped together with hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and homosexuals to become the so-called “4-H Club.” That led to the April 20, 1990, march by some 100,000 Haitians and their American and other allies, who literally shook the Brooklyn Bridge, as they crossed to downtown Manhattan from Cadman Plaza in a demonstration against that humiliation.

Within a month, the Centers for Disease Control, as well as the FDA, dropped Haitians from their “4-H Club.” This impressed politicians. The first Black mayor of New York, David Dinkins, who was friendly with Haitians, won the mayoralty with the support of the Haiti-Observateur, the weekly I founded with my brother Léo, in 1971.

However, in his rematch against Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani, Dinkins felt he didn’t need our help, because he was counting on the popularity of Haiti’s president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who visited Dinkins while Mr. Aristide was in exile at Washington, and to whom he symbolically gave the key to the city.

Mr. Giuliani, who was not then a friend of ours, asked for an interview with the Haiti-Observateur. In an editorial, we said, “Of the two candidates, only one thought Haitians had a say in this election. It’s Giuliani. May the better one win.” Mr. Giuliani beat the mayor by about the same number of votes he had lost four years earlier to Mr. Dinkins, who had won, in 1989, with 47,000 votes out of the 1.75 million cast.

A few days after the 1993 election, Mr. Giuliani told me, based on preliminary results, Haitians had voted for him overwhelmingly. That is all covered in a chapter entitled “The Power of the Haitian Vote,” a book I published in 2015.

I bring this up, because the campaign of the Trump people to tarnish Haitians is energizing Haitian-American voters in an unexpected way. Some who supported candidate Trump in 2016, have turned sour on him. This is especially true in Florida. A statement to me by the senior policy adviser to the Florida-based Haitian American Foundation for Democracy, Jocelyn McCalla, tells it all.

In part, he writes, “the hate mongering threatens Haitian immigrants, with all-too-real physical harm” from those who are already “harassing Haitians in Springfield.” He “calls on the authorities to take every measure necessary to protect a vulnerable population.”

Meantime, a campaign against the Trump ticket in Florida is in full swing among Haitian-American voters there — estimated at 350,000. As usual, they vote as a bloc, and that will be something to watch in a state that was thought to be in the bag for the 45th president.

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