Sometimes I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer when it comes to decoding dog whistles.
The latest “sticky” story from our Right is that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats.
This post is me, attempting to decode that last statement.
Raining cats and dogs. I get that.
The latest “sticky” story to become Republican dogma is that a wave of Haitian immigrants is threatening America’s pets.
On the one hand, dog is an excellent source of protein.
Source: Wikipedia
Seems a bit high in cholesterol, and so it should best be considered more of an occasional treat instead of regular daily fare.
But on the other hand, let it never be said that the U.S. Congress is not capable of addressing major crises facing America. Prior to this heroic 2018 legislation, below, commercial slaughter of dogs and cats for food was legal in 44 states. Or so this claims.
Source: Wikipedia
Didn’t Safeway used to stock that right next to the canned salmon? I may have confused that with some other disgusting-but-technically-edible thing. The less said the better, when it comes to canned seafood.
Anyway, those evil (fill-in-the-blank) eat your beloved (dog/cat/baby) is one of the oldest racist memes in the book. I think earliest recorded “Jews eat babies” smears date back to the early Middle Ages (e.g., Wikipedia), but oddly enough, that was preceded by a “Christians eat babies” thing, in early Rome. The only modern twist is that dogs and cats are treated as beloved family members now, so the meme has expanded to include common household pets as tasty comestibles.
So, I thought I had this figured out. Racist dog whistle, Republican party. Nothing new there. Just the latest twist.
They are, after all, animals.
How you parse “they” tells me something, I think. If you immediately tsk-tsked about callousness toward dogs and cats, score one point. If, in addition, you thought I plausibly meant to either “Republicans” or “Haitians” to be animals, you fall into a different class entirely.
No Irish need apply.
But why Haitian immigrants?
For the U.S. as a whole, the capture and deportation of illegal Haitian immigrants is a drop in the bucket.
Source: The Gummint. Data taken from: https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook/2022 , Immigrations, Enforcement Actions 2022 Data Tables, Table 34d. (It’s an Excel workbook.)
They’re up a lot, in the past couple of years, owing, I think, to political upheaval there. (I am somewhat sorry to say I don’t actually know what the trouble is, which makes me a not atypical American. Looking it up, it’s ah, looks like the total breakdown of the government and civil order, following the assassination of their President, leaving a country split and ruled by gangs. Plus some natural disaster or disasters. And to think that the President made a special exception for them, merely on the basis of that. /s)
But that was illegal immigrants caught, or some variation on that. What about legal immigrants from Haiti, of late?
The real numbers, from the Federal government, on legal immigration, give two different views. One is lawful permanent residents — the stock of persons who are here legally, but not citizens, in any given year. Think of them as mostly the stock of persons who are here, on their path to citizenship. And, naturalizations, the annual flow of persons who became citizens that year.
In no view do Haitians matter much, to the U.S. as a whole, as a source of immigrants, legal or (as above) illegal-and-caught.
Source: The Gummint, see cite above
A third and final set of official numbers is the U.S. resident foreign-born, that is, the stock of all persons resident in the U.S., in a given year, that were not born here. This comes from the U.S. Census.
It is often further allocated into legal and illegal, based on something-something-something.
The fraction of those who are here illegally is done kind-of-by-subtraction. We know the flow of naturalizations by year, and if we add that up over a long enough time period, and factor in human mortality, we end up with an estimate of the stock of foreign born. The legal foreign born. You have to add in the legal resident number — a known. But, if you give it enough years, the sum of cumulative naturalizations, less deaths, plus current stock of legal residents, give your your count of the legal foreign-born. Which we then compare with Census (the self-reported foreign-born) to arrive at an estimate illegal foreign-born U.S. population, by country, as the residual between those two numbers. Currently about 10M people.)
The upshot is that the number of individuals who self-report as being foreign-born is … as hard a number as that can be. No strong reason to lie about it, but no strong reason not to either. But the split into legal and illegal is … not necessarily wrong, but kinda by subtracting something figures derived from cumulating naturalizations over time, plus (I assume) some adjustment for deaths.
None of that matters, because Haitians manage to keep a low profile for that stat as well. They don’t show up among the top ten on the list of U.S.-resident illegal aliens by country.
Source: Department of Homeland Security.
So, if I, against my better judgment, try to figure out what the story is, it’s about Springfield Ohio. Which apparently does have a concentration of Haitian immigrants. But lacks any evidence of those people eating pets.
As an odd coda, note that the estimated number of illegal residents has been falling in recent years. Now be unsurprised that nobody even bothers to mention this. Because that’s … too normal, or something.
Nobody talks about the outflow of illegal immigrants out of the U.S. The big annual outflow of illegal immigrants, leaving the U.S., is something I learned in my earlier deep dives on immigration. Based on the numbers, it’s roughly the same magnitude as the inflow, and always has been. The southern border is porous — in both directions.
In any case, the net result of focusing on sticky instead of substance is that the Party of Lincoln Trump has managed to divert our attention to dog meat, and so squelch any serious and fact-based discussion on immigration.
My guess is, it’s going to take another Great Depression to put the adults back in charge of our Federal government. You can only afford to be this frivolous when times are good.
Oh, Haitian. Maybe it’s a double-sticky.
To understand why Republicans say what they do, sometime you must abandon all rationality, and just enter a world composed almost entirely of Sticky.
Stickiness, attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, describes a story’s ability to stick with you. To be remembered.
And, in my considered opinion, a desire for stickiness determines much of what Republican politicians say. And because of that, it really is that divorced from either reality or plausible Federal policy.
Upshot: I’m guessing Haitian immigrant get the national spotlight because Harris’ father is Jamaican. Which I’m figuring is close enough?
This is not to imply that dogs and cats are never consumed as meat, not that pets are never stolen and eaten.
But, equally, if your reaction to the original story was “oh, that’s nuts, there’s no outbreak of Hatians eating pets”, then you’ve fundamentally misunderstood the story.
It’s not about reality. It’s about sticky. And about throwing enough stuff at the wall until something sticks.
Give it another week, we’ll forget this Haitian dogs-n-cats story and we’ll be served a steaming portion of whatever sticky story is next. This is, as far as I can tell, a) effective strategy for the Republican party, and b) pretty much all there is to Republican rhetoric.
There is no logic behind highlighting the pressing national problem of Haitian petophagy. It serves zero useful purpose, beyond being a propaganda vehicle.
