On Wednesday, September 25, the Haitian Bridge Alliance—a Haitian-led advocacy organization working at the intersection of anti-immigration and anti-Blackness—brought charges against the Republican presidential ticket for circulating unfounded rumors about immigrant communities drawn to Springfield, Ohio for work. Even though these statements have been disproven, right-wing media and vigilante groups have doubled down on aggressions against Haitian communities in Ohio and elsewhere, with hostilities escalating to bomb threats and racist attacks.
The backlash against this community in Springfield wasn’t immediate. Just a few years ago, Haitian immigrant workers in the Midwest were welcomed by many as a much-needed labor force in deindustrialized and depopulated “Rust Belt” cities. Yet as the closely contested November 5 election approaches, Republicans have turned to a familiar playbook, stoking xenophobia and anti-Blackness to turn out their base.
This Republican strategy is effective because it rests on longstanding racism that has shaped immigration policies in the United States. Such policies are based on white supremacy, racist exclusion, and labor extraction, reflecting U.S. racial politics rooted in settler colonialism and Black chattel enslavement. In short, anti-immigration sentiment and racism—particularly, anti-Blackness—often operate together. Haitians have long faced these twin hatreds even while being sought after as an exploitable labor force. Today, with changing policies and patterns of migration, these dynamics take on new, if familiar, contours.
Disposable Labor
Between the mid-1960s and 1970s, Haitians were a sought-after immigration population for the United States. After passing the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration Act, which eliminated explicitly racist 1920s-era national-origin quotas, the United States actively began recruiting Haitians to fill a labor shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers resulting from the Vietnam War. Many Haitian immigrants, fleeing the U.S.-backed Duvalier regime (1957-1986), received visas to work in sectors ranging from medicine, law, and education to craft trades and manufacturing.
Beginning in the 1970s, Haitians who could not secure visas arrived in the United States through unofficial routes and filled needed positions among the undocumented labor force. Like other non-white immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, Haitians were a necessary labor force that could become disposable with a change of political wind.
Those shifting winds came as, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberal economic policies drove unionized, relatively well-paying manufacturing jobs out of the United States while simultaneously upending economies and rural livelihoods across Latin America and the Caribbean, including in Haiti. Decades later, small Midwestern Rust Belt cities still struggle to recover. To manage the fallout, demagogic, xenophobic politicians directed unemployed workers’ anger away from capitalist greed and toward Black and Brown “others.”
Anti-immigrant policies and actions are a two-party consensus. President Barack Obama earned the title of “deporter-in-chief,” and with more deportations under his watch than under Donald Trump’s, Joe Biden is on track to live up to his Democratic predecessor’s legacy. Haitians, especially, are a target. In Biden’s first year in office, his administration deported more than 20,000 Haitians, almost as many as the previous three administrations combined over 20 years.
This deportation machine was, in fact, set up by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, on September 30, 1996.
As violence targeting Haitian communities increases, September 30 also marks the reach of U.S. imperialism. On this day in 1991, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was ousted by a coup with CIA support. Leaders of the putsch were trained at the School of Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Following the 1991 coup, the U.S.-supported Haitian paramilitary regime, FRAPH, decapitated the democratic movement in Haiti, killing thousands and forcing tens of thousands more to flee. As activist Ninaj Raoul has shared, Haitian communities organized to confront the immigrant cruelty consensus. Some were politicized in the fight against the discrimination and violence that incorrectly blamed Haitian immigrants for being a source of HIV/AIDS.
Where Anti-Immigration Meets Anti-Blackness
For Haitians, xenophobia intersects with deep-seated anti-Black racism. Haitians have not only been accused of taking the jobs of U.S. citizens but also depicted through a lens of anti-Blackness, portraying them as threats to white U.S. society. This anti-Haitianism has a long history in the United States and is rooted in U.S. imperialism in Haiti and throughout Latin America. Anti-Haitianism is more than xenophobia, and more than anti-Blackness. As Elie Mystal writes in The Nation, white people have never forgiven Haitians for their freedom.
Organizing among Haitian immigrants has been a primary strategy for combating anti-Haitianism. Since the 1990s, Haitian communities organized human rights networks, support services, hometown associations, and engaged in the formal political process to tackle widespread discrimination along lines of immigration status, race, and class. Haitian immigrants have thus been able to secure pathways to permanent residence and citizenship and even gain political leadership roles. The well-established social, political, and labor networks within Haitian communities in hub destinations like New York, Boston, and Miami have facilitated this organizing and individual and collective gains.
While anti-Haitianism is nothing new, Haitian immigrants arriving and settling in the Midwest today face new challenges—challenges fueled by new mechanisms of U.S. imperialism. We summarize these challenges in three categories: the temporariness of immigration statuses; the externalization of U.S. borders in Latin America; and the geographical distance of these new locations from Haitian immigrant destination hubs. These new realities call for new forms of organizing.
After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Obama administration granted undocumented Haitians living in the United States Temporary Protected Status (TPS), renewable every 18 months. This temporary status allows recipients to work legally, but the United States can revoke it anytime. TPS does not offer pathways to permanency and even increases the deportability of undocumented Haitians.
In addition to these TPS holders, many recent Haitian immigrants are on another temporary status: the two-year status created by the Biden administration’s 2023 Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. The parole program has the same limitations as TPS. But unlike TPS, which is a protection from deportation extended to immigrants already in the United States, the humanitarian parole status targets those living outside of U.S. borders. It is part of a package of border externalization policies that the White House implemented to reduce irregular immigration from these Latin American countries, a primary driver of migration at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years.
Finally, unlike previous populations of Haitians in the United States, these recent immigrants are living far from the resources and networks destination hubs offer. And while the Midwest provides affordable housing and low-skilled jobs, it lacks established Haitian communities and the racial and ethnic diversity of New York or Miami. The Midwest also suffers from a long history of racial terror and segregation, traditions now being stoked for political gain.
Toward a Hemispheric Approach to Anti-Haitianism
As the first Black Republic and what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West,” Haiti and Haitians have been a laboratory not only for white supremacist and anti-immigration policies “at home” in the United States, but also for U.S. imperialism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Combating anti-Haitianism is crucial to achieving racial and immigrant justice in the U.S. and upending U.S. imperialism throughout the hemisphere.
The current vitriol and violence against Haitian communities are reflections of the externalization of the U.S. border. The U.S. Empire, founded on and long a fomenter of racial capitalism, shaped the contours of mobility and containment. Imperialist intervention across the hemisphere, including dozens of coups d’etat, military invasions, and arms embargoes, have long aimed to quash popular resistance and alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and U.S. hegemony. Today, the United States extends its borders through policies like the 2019 “Remain in Mexico policy”, Title 42, and the Biden administration’s Humanitarian Parole Program.
This essay introduces a short series of articles that will be published weekly leading up to the U.S. election. Together, this series will offer context about Haitian community organizing, TPS and humanitarian parole, the hemispheric routes of Haitian migration, why the Midwest, and immigrant experiences and anti-Haitianism in general.
This politics of containment, limiting whose lives matter, is a new mechanism for U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Therefore, confronting and organizing against this rise of anti-Haitianism requires a hemispheric approach—one that acknowledges the new challenges rooted in longstanding U.S. imperialism.
Darlène Dubuisson is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She works on issues of Global anti-Blackness, migration and diaspora, and crises and futures, with a geographic focus on the Caribbean and Latin America. She is also the author of Reclaiming Haiti’s Futures: Returned Intellectuals, Placemaking, and Radical Imagination.
Mark Schuller is Professor of Anthropology and Nonprofit and NGO Studies at Northern Illinois University. His eight books include Humanity’s Last Stand: Confronting Global Catastrophe, and he co-directed/co-produced Poto Mitan. Schuller received the Margaret Mead Award, the Anthropology in Media Award, and the Haitian Studies Association’s Award for Excellence.
