It’s hard to think of anything that more perfectly sums up everything warped and wrong with the US immigration debate than the ongoing row over Haitian migrants in an Ohio town.
In case you haven’t been acquainted with this rancid incident, for the past week, right-wing influencers and the Donald Trump presidential campaign have been spreading a rumor that Haitians who immigrated to the Ohio town of Springfield are killing and eating other locals’ pets. They are not. In fact, it is hard to overstate just how much they are not: not a single shred of evidence has surfaced for this made-up story, the claims underlying it have been repeatedly debunked, and it turns out the Trump campaign even directly asked Springfield’s city manager whether there was any truth to the claim and was told there wasn’t, only to push the fake stories anyway.
It would hardly be worth giving this repulsive, racist fantasy any more attention if not for what it says about the ugly state of US politics right now.
Let’s start with Trump, J. D. Vance, the Republican Party, and the entire conservative movement, who breathed this wretched saga to life in the first place. Back in 2016, the one and only time Trump has actually won an election (though, it should always be said, not the popular vote) against the Democrats, he genuinely appealed to struggling Americans by talking about jobs and trade far more than he did about immigration, helping set the stage for years of overwrought claims that Trump had transformed the GOP into the “party of workers.”
Trump’s pick of Vance, some claimed, was another data point suggesting his campaign and Republicans were moving in a bold new economically populist direction, given the Ohio senator’s working-class roots and…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
