The people displaced by the earthquake who decided that the best survival strategy was to get out of Haiti and make their way to Texas did so not after seriously considering all of the hazards lying in their way but because they knew that those hazards were worth braving if it meant escaping from the homeland that repeatedly failed them.
Eleven years ago, after the earthquake struck Haiti, probably the one country in the Americas that is least capable of withstanding such a blow, I published a post on this blog called Long Live Haiti in which I wrote:
For decades, Americans and Europeans have been subjected to pictures on their television screens of the victims of famine, disease and disaster in Africa, Asia and South America. they have had to develop, whether they liked it or not, a compunction regarding people all over the world who have survived floods, earthquakes, wars, and epidemics, only to find themselves without any means of surviving another day without food or water. In a very real sense, well-off Westerners have had to accept some of the responsibility for the world being the way that it is. They have had to face up to the fact that, no matter how far away the disaster had unfolded, they were living in the same world as its victims.
Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. It is also the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that was created, in 1804, from a slave revolt. That left Haiti in the unique position of being a virtual African state in the Caribbean, surrounded by European colonies - British, Spanish, and French. Throughout its calamitous history, it has been invaded, annexed, and otherwise exploited by its neighbors - including the United States. Since the ouster of Jean-Claude "Bébé Doc" Duvalier in 1986, Haiti has tacitly been a democracy, but a very fragile and contentious one. It remains as it has always been, desperately poor, beset with murderous paramilitary groups and private armies, an economy that was never stable enough even to be shattered, seasonal tropical storms and cyclones, and now earthquakes.
The people who have, over the years, grown quite understandably weary of seeing pictures of starving people on their TV screens may never contribute a penny to relief organizations. But whether they like it or not, they are citizens of the same world that makes such suffering possible, the same world that could alleviate all poverty, all famine in the world, but has chosen not to. It has decided instead to pretend that the only solution to these problems is the exportation and promotion of their economic affluence - the "trickle down" effect that will, some day in an unforeseen future, make everyone, if not economic equals, at least self-sufficient.
When I got out of the Navy in 1995, I went to live with my sister in Aurora, Colorado. I started looking for a job and because she was working in a local hospital, my sister suggested that I apply for an armed security job in the hospital’s ER. She knew that one of the guards was leaving and a few weeks later I had replaced him.
One November morning I was working my 8 to 4 shift in the ER when an ambulance brought in a man and woman. The head nurse notified me that one of them, the woman on the gurney, was a combative patient and that I should stand by. The EMTs pushed the gurney into a room indicated by the nurse. The man followed them. The woman was crying out and waiving her hands hysterically. The man was saying things to her in a foreign language.
After the EMTs gave the nurse their report - that someone had called 911 on a disturbance involving an African-American couple a nearby park. After responding to the call, the police notified the EMTs of a possible psych issue with the woman - the ER nurse went into the room to question the couple. The woman continued to cry out and wave her hands in the air, and the man spoke only broken English. The nurse then told me to keep an eye on them and left the room. The nurse then made a call for a psychological evaluation of the patient.
I stood by the door and listened to the couple and discovered that they were speaking French to each other. I came forward and said, “Taissez vous!” (shut up) and the woman immediately stopped screaming. They both looked at me, as if astonished. The man smiled and asked me “Vous parlez Français?”
“Un peu,” (a little), I answered.
The man then began telling me what had happened to them. They were Haitian immigrants who had come to Colorado from New Mexico by bus. Because they knew no one in the city and couldn’t afford a hotel, they decided to sleep in the open in the small city park. The temperature the night before had dipped below freezing and because they were completely unaccustomed to such cold, and had nothing to cover themselves with during the night, the woman’s hands had been frostbitten – a condition unknown in their tropical country. As soon as her hands became warm again in the morning they began to cause terrible pain in her fingers. I excused myself and went and explained to the nurse what the man had told me.
Even taking into account their ignorance of English and the seriousness of the woman’s frostbite, it seemed obvious to me that it was the color of their skin that brought about the 911 call, the police response and the presumption of the woman’s mental state. The present crisis on the border, which has lately resulted in a response by border patrolmen on horseback riding down Haitian immigrants on the Texas side of the river, as well as the forcible repatriation of many of the immigrants back to Haiti via military transport, perfectly illustrates how irrational are Americans’ fears about immigration. The swiftness of the response also exposes the racist element behind American immigration policies.
The obvious solution to the immigration problem is to find a way to improve living conditions for the people in the countries that are commonly the source of immigrants. Enemies of immigration simply don’t care to know what could possibly impel people to risk their lives trekking to the US border. Their arguments about yhem coming to steal American jobs is more than a little preposterous when there’s now a labor shortage in many parts of the country. It seems to me that the number of jobs that Americans are unwilling to work for any wage has grown considerably during the pandemic. The work usually taken by immigrants, like the nightly cleaning of office buildings, might now include many more employment options. Americans aren’t lazy, but their understanding of quid pro quo is, by now, quite sophisticated. If the economy is going to recover, the only question for now is, who else but these immigrants, documented or undocumented, will do the work?
Shut up and let the immigrants in.
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