Nowadays, it is a fashionable way for minority writers to tell their life stories by telling the reader how hard it was: how they were bullied at school, how they were denied jobs and other opportunities, and how their family business was defaced with hateful graffiti.
But that wasn’t my experience at all. I grew up as the son of two Pakistani Muslims in the deep south. I would occasionally run into a few bozos here and there, but generally I felt welcome and at home. People would often ask me where I was from, but that just gave me the opportunity to tell them a much more interesting story than they might have expected.
That was true even after 9/11. I remember my father telling me that one of his friends, a white Southerner who I’m sure voted for Bush-Cheney, came to him and told him that if anyone messed with us, we should come to him first. He would sort it out.
This was life for me growing up in a conservative part of the country. There were many issues that I disagreed with my friends and neighbors about, but I was optimistic about my place in the country. Racism and bigotry were real problems, but I increasingly saw them as something in the rearview mirror. Even when I encountered frustrations—the first major one was in high school, when I watched my country invade Iraq on flimsy pretenses—I told myself it wouldn’t be this way forever. My recently launched newsletter, The American Saga, is all about learning from our mistakes and becoming better.
We are not a perfect country, but we are constantly improving.
That’s why my heart sank last week when I watched much of the labor right throw itself into a frenzy over the presence of Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio. The whole episode reminded me of moral panics earlier in American history, of nativist hysteria directed at Jews, Catholics, Italians, and others who didn’t neatly fit the mold of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who colonized this country.
For those who don’t know, it all started like this: early September, New York Times discussed Springfield’s immigration debates in a nuanced piece that explored the dynamics at play. For years, Springfield’s population had been declining and its economy was struggling. Starting around 2014, the city decided to try a rejuvenation strategy: working with other Rust Belt communities to encourage more people from around the world to move there.
The last wave of these immigrants were Haitians. As the Times reports in his lengthy piece that the influx of an estimated 20,000 Haitians and other immigrants has revitalized the city’s economy. “They come to work every day. They don’t cause any drama. They’re on time,” Jamie McGregor, who runs a family metal business in the city, told the Times. But tensions ran high after a tragedy last year, when a minivan collided with a school bus in a traffic accident, and the driver happened to be one of the Haitian immigrants. Many in the city blamed not just the reckless driver, but the entire Haitian community. “No one asked anyone in this community what we thought about them coming here and invading our city,” one resident said of the Haitians at a rally in July.
As the Times Notably, one of the most outspoken critics of immigrants was Republican Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in July, just days before he was announced as Donald Trump’s running mate, Vance implored the audience, “Go to Springfield … and ask the people there if they have been enriched by 20,000 newcomers in four years.”
Vance pointed to rising housing prices and health care spending as problems in the area. I don’t know all about the economic problems associated with the city’s rapid growth, but state and local officials have been working on them.
Debates about immigration, assimilation, and the way American communities are being transformed by foreign-born newcomers are legitimate. What happened in the past few days, however, was not.
Earlier this week, Vance and other leading Republicans escalated their panic. They stopped telling a story about a small town struggling with social and demographic change. Instead, they dialed up the rhetoric, depicting a place where brutal invaders were destroying the American way of life, one animal at a time.
“Months ago I addressed the issue of illegal Haitian immigrants draining welfare resources and generally causing chaos throughout Springfield, Ohio,” Vance tweeted Monday. “Reports now show people have had their pets kidnapped and eaten by people who don’t belong in this country.”
It’s unclear where Vance got his reports, but the Ohio senator is notorious online. Right-wing sources all over social media had flooded the area with claims that Haitian immigrants had been stealing and eating people’s pets, specifically cats. One source for this claim was a video made popular by influencer Ian Miles Cheong (who lives in Malaysia). In the video, a woman is questioned by police for killing and eating a cat.
But there were problems with that video. First, it was filmed in Canton, Ohio, not Springfield. And more importantly, there is no indication that the woman is Haitian; she has an American name. It is not clear why she committed this act of animal cruelty, but if I had to guess, mental illness or drugs were the main culprits, not a foreign culture.
Then there was a photo of a black man carrying what looked like a goose. It was accompanied by rumors that Haitian locations were catching geese and ducks. I followed that photo to a Reddit post from Columbus, Ohio, that was made over a month ago. The Federalist placed a call from a resident who said he had seen individuals with geese, though county officials say it was the only such call they received in 11 months and they found no evidence of it.
The rumors were enough to send senior GOP lawmakers into a frenzy. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posted an image of two cats next to the quote, “Please vote for Trump so Haitian immigrants don’t eat us.” The House Judiciary Committee warned that “Kamala Harris laughs while illegal aliens eat your pets.” Donald Trump himself put his own spin on Springfield, hysterically warning in his first televised debate with Harris that people’s dogs are now being eaten by the city’s immigrants.
I am not one of those who say that Americans should embrace all forms of immigration without fear. Again, it is perfectly legitimate to debate what kind and how much immigration we want to allow. After all, it is our country.
Most people feel anxious when the world around them is changing. I remember living in Northern Virginia in 2020, when Confederate statues were toppling and streets across the region were being renamed left and right. Even I, as someone with zero connection to the Confederacy and no sympathy for the cause, felt a little uneasy about having to learn new names for things I always referred to by a different word.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an older, established person who grew up without ever meeting someone from another country and suddenly see your community look completely different. People not only look different, they speak different languages, they have unusual customs, and you may even have to change things in your life to accommodate them.
Those of us who are relatively tolerant of immigrants need to understand the perspective of these more conservative people because they are our fellow Americans. We only have one America, and we need to learn to share it with people whose families have been here for generations and with relative newcomers. Moreover, having worked in politics in a previous life, I know that when it comes to campaign time, partisans on both sides are often overwhelmed by a sense of justification because you sincerely believe that your party is better suited to govern than the other. The end justifies the means.
But consider this: Millions of people now believe that immigrants are slaughtering their beloved cats and dogs. How will these people approach immigrants, or people they think are immigrants, if that is what they believe? Are we setting ourselves up for another mass shooting in Buffalo or El Paso?
Last month, a neo-Nazi group called Blood Tribe marched through Springfield. One of its leaders spoke at a city council meeting, denouncing Haitian “savages.” BloodTribe took to Gab, a far-right social networking platform, and boasted three days ago: “No one else is more aware of what’s happening in #Springfield from the WN perspective than we are. Our boots are literally on the ground there weekly.” If they did commit an atrocity, it wouldn’t be the first. In 2023, a Springfield man was arrested for hate crimes against Haitians, including robbery and assault.
Is this the conservatism I grew up with? Feeding in this? The leaders of today’s Republican Party understandably want to win the election. But it is less understandable to want to take the soul of the country down with them.
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