Erica Joseph was born and raised in Haiti. In Chile she earned a bachelor's degree in Public Relations and a master's degree in International Studies. She is the author of the chronicle Necrology of a Haitian Community in Chile.

The quiet morning of Tuesday, September 3, 2024, started ordinarily for Haitians living in the United States, until an article came out that appeared to be an innocent report on the increase of Haitian migrants in Ohio, while mentioning a bus accident also involving Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio. In the pages of The New York Times on that dark Tuesday one could read: How an Ohio Town landed in the Middle of the immigration Debate!

The bottom of the article read: "employment attracted thousands of Haitians to Springfield, Ohio. But then, in August, an immigrant driver was involved in a fatal school bus crash in August, setting the stage for another debate about immigration in America, this one amplified by JD Vance."

The unimaginable reach of a single digital publication

The global Millennial generation, born between approximately 1981 and 1996, has been immersed in a world defined by rapid technological evolution. Since childhood, Millennials have witnessed an unprecedented technology-driven transformation. The advent of the Internet, mobile phones and social media has drastically redefined not only how we access information, but also how we connect with others and perceive the world around us. These digital tools have expanded and "democratised" knowledge, facilitating instant access to data and educational resources that were previously limited and expensive.

Global connectivity has allowed Millennials to establish social networks beyond any physical borders, broadening their cultural and professional horizons in ways unimaginable to previous generations. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the digital giant that is Tik Tok have served not only as spaces for social interaction, but also as platforms for political and social activism, allowing the voices of this generation to be heard and amplified on a global scale.

While international millennials are in the midst of invention, adapting to so much emotional and digital transition, we, the Haitian millennial generation, have lived and are living a roller coaster of climate and migratory transition, bringing with it shame and bewilderment. In our short lives, we have already suffered the worst catastrophes of our country.

Precedents of nudity and international humiliation!

We Haitians have been the laughing stock of all, in various contexts. More than once, the warm Caribbean nature, supposed to warm our curves, has stripped us bare before the eye of the world! Unfortunately, our geographical position has put us fat too often - and literally - in the eye of the storm. In the last thirty years, Haiti has suffered several natural disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes.

For example, in 2016, Hurricane Matthew wreaked devastation across the island. According to a comparative study published in Bonn, Germany, where the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 23) was held, Haiti, Zimbabwe and Fiji have been the three countries to have suffered the most from climate disasters in 2016.

This situation of constant disasters and crises has generated a continuous and sustained increase in international aid to the country, leading to the installation of a "development machine" by bilateral donors, multilateral agencies and more than ten thousand non-governmental organizations, inducing many experts to call Haiti the republic of NGOs. These organizations operate in the country without much control, and in reality, only serve to sell and expose Haitian misery and misfortune.

Springfield, the powder keg

In the week following the first article in The New York Time, that is, during the very week of the presidential debate in the United States, rumour spread like wildfire. The Haitian community in Springfield was on its feet! In so many tweets, or X, (we don't even know what to call it anymore), in so many online posts, you could read verbatim or between the lines how Haitian 'cannibals' had taken over the rural and run-down town of Springfield, Ohio.

"They are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats, they are eating the PETS of the people that live there!"

As the Haitian proverb goes: Lèw pa lakay ou, tout bagay mal ki pase, sanble avèw!( When you are in someone else's house, whatever bad thing happens, you seem to be the culprit!) And another - tout abitid se vis (habit is second nature). On the renamed social network, posts have gone viral, and the very owner of said network has accused Haitians of eating the pets of the "fragile white people" of rural Springfield! To top it off, some of the Haitian diaspora are wondering whether his words might actually contain some truth! Someone in his position wouldn't spread false rumours, surely? It takes less than twenty-four hours before all we can do is look on helplessly as the whole world talks about it. 

What seemed to be a joke in very bad taste in a Facebook group ends up being damaging and embarrassing for a whole global community in the diaspora. On Tik Tok and all other social networks, a video went viral of a white lady, who the news described as weighing 90 pounds, whose "fragility" was visible because of how thin and shocked she looked as she spoke at the county neighbourhood meeting. She described the situation in rural Springfield, with the presence of so many black people, as "Unsafe, Fear, Uncivilized, Overwhelmed, Concerned, Unsustainable, people speaking strange language, dangerous, trash invasion to my homeland."

Another, larger lady, told a moving story of her childhood in Springfield, describing it as paradise itself, and lamenting how "these Haitian blacks" now bring poverty, cannibalism and shame. Between the lines one can almost replace the word "Haitian" with "criminal", or understand "crime" as code for "migrant". Thus justifying and transforming racism and xenophobia into a virtue.

Si'n pa pale n'ap toufe! If we speak we suffocate!

While the networks were ablaze at 105 Fahrenheit, while they were portraying that candidate as the messiah coming to save the American empire from the invasion of the Haitian cannibals and barbarians; while that space tycoon, who had once spread reptilian rumours, was publishing on the subject, we Haitians were bewildered, full of shame, powerless and on our knees in someone else's home. In the city of Louisville, in conversations with a Haitian American from the city, winner of the 2015 'black achiever' award, he recalls how he left Haiti in the midst of the controversy resulting from the cholera epidemic caused by the peace mission in Haiti in 2012, exclaiming that his life in Haiti has prepared him to face the difficulties of living in a country hostile to his Haitian identity. He explained and illustrated his comments: "For example, here, when they cook, they measure each portion before adding it to the recipe, but in Haiti, we ordinary people don't measure portions. It may seem like a simple and exaggerated example, but it shows precautions that they take and we don't." He continues, saying, "If, in Haiti, we had a minimum of that discipline, there are things we would never accept as a country!" Another of my interviewees in the midst of the Springfield controversy said: "Many of us come from such poverty that we accept anything! It's not that we are uneducated, but that we lack education."

Our gut hurts when one of us is in pain.

Another Haitian, a former philosophy professor in Haiti, who like many other Haitian brothers in the past year has been able to escape gang violence in Port-au-Prince to come to work as a "leve bwat", a Haitian term for those who work in entry-level jobs, like those who lift loads in the United States. He describes with amazement, working as a "human forklift" in a manufacturing company in the American Midwest, and shares his perspective and bewilderment at the situation in Springfield.

According to him, there are two fundamental ways to categorise emotions in this situation. From perplexity to embarrassment. Pride, he says, is that in a people or community, a bond that associates your identity with a set of values that give you a feeling of belonging; where one succeeds, we all do, and where one fails, so do we all. It is valid as long as one of us is involved in an international scandal. There is a Creole priciple that sums this up "si nen pran kou je w ap kouri dlo" (when your nose is hit, your eyes will fill with tears). It is also important to look at it from the perspective of personal pride, which makes us look in the mirror and admit that one of us may have made a mistake that judges and affects us all, but that does not change who we are, neither in our behaviour nor in the values each of us cultivates as individuals.

I asked him if he was ashamed or perplexed to be Haitian at this point. He simply repeated my question before elaborating on his answer like the excellent philosopher he is!

"Am I ashamed? I would be ashamed to be ashamed that one of us supposedly made a mistake that we believe could affect us all. It was not a choice to be born Haitian, it was my destiny, so for me it is a privilege to be born in a nation where many factors and reasons still place us in international debates. So I have nothing to be ashamed of, I have to look at myself and say that we could have done more and we must do more to restore our image before the world because although some are making mistakes, there are many others who deserve recognition. I am proud to be born Haitian, I can't change it and neither do I want to" he concluded.

Is the United States a country of immigrants?

For many Haitians living in Haiti or those who have already emigrated to other parts of the world, the United States represents much more than just a tourist destination or a place for job opportunities. The United States is described and created in the Haitian popular imagination as that place of realised dreams, as a giant of hopes and possibilities. From the outside, we see it as a land of abundance, where opportunities are endless and the quality of life is incomparable. The stories of those who have lived experience of migrating to the United States are often filled with narratives of success and achievement, feeding the perception that this country is truly a paradise on earth, a place of miracles where the blind regain their sight, the disabled regain their abilities. Thus, in popular imagination and in the global mainstream, the United States is promoted as the land of dreams, and the American dream resonates across all borders or continents.

(1) The UN estimates that this figure may be around 50,661,149 people now, which translates to 15.42% of the total population. Being that the last national census was conducted in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, the official national data may lack context

As the U.S. is a "country of immigrants", and migration as human mobility in recent years has been highly controversial, the narrative around the issue remains uninformed, incomplete and highly selective. Despite the controversy, the latest 2020 census revealed that about 44.9 million (1) of the total population were foreign-born(2)

The United States has long been an attractive country for migrants seeking a better life. However, since the early years that have cemented this nation's independence foundations, immigration policies have always been selective. Now, with the exacerbation of humanity's despair over the impact of COVID 19, the American behemoth has become increasingly selective about migration, prioritising certain groups over others. Through these lines and recent stories, we see the scope and implications of selective immigration policies in the United States. The U.S. immigration system highly complex, with many avenues of entry, including categories based on family, employment and humanitarian grounds.

(2) The foreign-born population consists of anyone who is not a U.S. citizen at birth. This includes the 4 persons who have become U.S. citizens through naturalization. All others are counted among the native-born population, which comprises any U.S. citizen at birth, including persons born in the United States, Puerto Rico, an insular area of the U.S. (Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands), or abroad to a U.S. citizen parent or parents.

Following independence, the United States began regulating immigration by enacting laws that reflected the policies and migration flows of that time. For example, the Naturalization Act of 1790 (1stat.103) established the rules for becoming a citizen exclusively for free white persons of "good character" who had resided in the country for at least two years, thus excluding Native Americans, slaves, free blacks people, indentured servants, and Asian people. With the revision of the Naturalization Act in 1870, Congress went further by extending citizenship eligibility to "free white aliens" as well as to people of African birth or descent, laying the groundwork for future confusion over racial eligibility for citizenship.

 Beginning in 1875, immigration was increasingly restricted, with bans on criminals, people with contagious diseases, polygamists, anarchists, beggars and traffickers of prostitutes. On February 5, 1917, Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1917, (also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act) intended to prevent "undesirables" from entering the U.S. This was the first broadly restrictive immigration law, which laid the foundation for the Quota Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could enter the U.S. However, socio-political and geopolitical factors related to World War II, and decolonisation processes, allowed for the passing of the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was not until the 1970s that laws focused on refugees, including assistance for other nationalities, including Chinese, Nicaraguans and Haitians. In 1990, "temporary protected status" was created to protect mainly Central American migrants from deportation to countries facing natural disasters and armed conflict (the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 meant that immigration had been dominated by people born in Asia and Latin America, rather than Europe, and now this new system favoured family reunification and skilled immigrants, rather than national quotas.) On November 6, 1986, the Reagan administration, with the Reform and Control Act, increased border enforcement and closed many migration routes.

Penguin

Recommended reading on the current state of migration research: Hein de Haas | How Migration Really Works: 22 things you need to know about the most divisive issue in politics  | Penguin | 464 pages | 8.99 EUR

In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was enacted (In 1990, The George H.W. Bush administration enacted the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) program, permitting eligible nationals or citizens from designated countries to maintain temporary juridical immigration or refugee status, work authorization, and protection from deportation) which sought to strengthen U.S. immigration laws from a national interest and security standpoint, thus adding section 287G, which provides for jail sentences for undocumented immigrants. ICE and the requesting Law Enforcement Agency (LEA) signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) that defined the scope, duration, and 14 limitations of the delegation of authority. It also set forth the training requirements, and the terms of ICE supervision, and required the partnering LEA to follow DHS and ICE policies when its designated immigration officers (DIOs) perform delegated immigration enforcement functions.

 In summary, between 1783 and 2019, more than 86 million people have immigrated to the United States. In the most controversial and recent statistics and stories, the CBP One application allows for advance appointments to enter the United States and the Humanitarian Parole program allows for the entry of migrants in an organised manner. Both programs are also in the eye of the storm. As of mid-April 2024, more than 435,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans have arrived in the U.S. through the Humanitarian Parole. In turn, since May 2023, the U.S. giant has returned some 690,000 migrants who had attempted to cross the border illegally. Also as of mid-April, some 547,000 migrants were able to schedule appointments "to present themselves in a safe and orderly manner" at U.S. ports of entry through the CBP One app, a tool that the Department of Homeland Security launched in January 2023 with the purpose of facilitating legal arrivals at the border.

The legal regime under which they migrated has changed radically, along with the tumult of the presidential elections, and the policies surrounding those changes have been and continue to be contentious, always with a racial structural basis. Such past and current immigration policies inflame the current political debate.

Erica Joseph @literatur.review: The Underworld of the First World -  From Haiti to the U.S.: In Search of a New Language for Migration and the Encounter with our Demons and Dreams

So, as Haitians we get used to not speaking up when people really don't even ask you and just assume. Unfortunately, we are used to watching and listening, not talking. Our generation is expected to move heaven and earth, but even with so much technology we are still more lost than ever. And even more so as a migrant, since we live a life of transition and change. Sometimes you imagine that if something happened to you, you'd be trapped alone in an electronic coffin. What a dramatic thought, right?

Well, whether we accept it or not, being a migrant is one of the most thankless situations there is! We are there to contribute to the host country, while trying to keep in mind and heal the wounds of those left behind, but in the end, in times of great need we are alone in that great abyss of another's home. We don't fit in, because ultimately, the host country takes our presence for granted as we crawl in search of the holy grail that is the American dream! While Haiti, our real home in the Caribbean, is in total chaos - where would we Haitians return to if our country is literally in flames, in the hands of the gangs?