Portside

For weeks now, right-wing pundits and politicians have spread baseless claims about Haitian immigrants.

These lies have caused immense fear among the community, leading to bomb threats, harassment, and vandalism. The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio — the first but not the last to be targeted — reported being “scared for their lives”.

I’m not Haitian. I’m an American-born citizen who’s never set foot in Ohio. But as the daughter of a Black immigrant family, these lies worry me, too.

I know personally how easily identifiable we are. Even though my Nigerian parents were both naturalized over 20 years ago, they still have strong accents. We have distinctive names. To someone who was radicalized by the hateful rhetoric flying around, my family and I are obvious targets. 

Just like how Donald Trump’s earlier comments targeting Mexican or Chinese people spawned a wave of hate against all Latin Americans, Asians, or others thought to “look” Mexican or Chinese, the baseless accusations about Haitians will rebound to all Black immigrants — and the Black community as a whole.

Growing up, I’ve seen firsthand how Black immigrants are some of our most vulnerable community members. For one, many of these immigrants come from largely Black countries and are unprepared for the experience of confronting racism in a way they never had to before. 

Black immigrant communities live all across the country. While states like New York have long had Black immigrant communities, a Pew Research study in 2022 showed that a plurality — 42 percent — of Black immigrants now live in the South. My parents are among them.

Texas’s Black immigrant population has shot up in the last decade, and the state now houses the third biggest Black immigrant population. Other states are seeing similarly big increases. In Colorado, the Black immigrant population grew over fourfold during that period.

Though politicians increasingly characterize immigration as a problem, immigrants have always been — and are still — a massive benefit to our society. 

For one, both documented and undocumented immigrants provide more to our economy than they take out. Far from being burdens, immigrants actually create economic growth in the places they arrive in. The Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio helped fill jobs that were abandoned due to the town’s shrinking population, leading to a boost in wages for the whole community.

Moreover, far from bringing in “drugs and crime,” as some politicians claim, studies have shown that having more immigrants in a community actually tends to reduce crime rates. Both undocumented and documented immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than U.S.-born citizens. 

And in regards to drugs, it’s not immigrants who are smuggling illicit substances into our country — by an enormous margin, it’s U.S. citizens. Federal authorities recently charged dozens of members of a neo-Nazi group with trafficking fentanyl in California, for example.

Instead, immigrants like my parents bring in culture, innovation, and diversity — all good things that make this country what it is. We should be supporting immigrants more, not slandering them on the national stage. 

But for some, sowing division is more attractive than actually finding solutions to the problems we face. The attacks on Haitian immigrants is more than a disgusting lie — it’s an attempt to redefine who counts as an “American,” with my family and people like us on the outside. 

Our leaders need to have the courage to defend immigrants when these baseless claims are spread. They owe it to all Americans, both citizens and immigrants.

Chisom Okorafor is a Henry A. Wallace fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.