It was January 2018, and America’s political class was apoplectic. The sitting president of the United States had said something terrible — unforgivable, even. “[A]bhorrent and repulsive,” then-Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) fumed. “We are deeply disturbed and offended,” thundered a joint statement from a coalition of House Democrats. “I cannot believe,” added Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), “that in the history of the White House … any president has spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak today.”
The comment in question had allegedly come during a private Oval Office meeting between then-President Donald Trump and a bipartisan group of senators. In a moment of frustration, Trump exclaimed, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”
The president was unconvinced by a proposal to insulate immigrants from Haiti and a number of other countries from deportation; instead, according to the Washington Post, he suggested “that the United States should … bring more people from countries such as Norway” and “from Asian countries because he felt that they help the United States economically.” At the time, Trump’s colorful choice of words was “denounced across the globe,” Politico relayed gravely. But as it pertains to Haiti, at least, they may have been an understatement.
The U.S. State Department appears to have reached a similar conclusion: Last week, it urged Americans in Haiti to leave the country and directed U.S. military forces to evacuate American Embassy staff overnight.
The move couldn’t come soon enough. What is transpiring in Haiti is so post-apocalyptic — so unspeakably brutal — that it would be impossible to believe were it not for the steady stream of phone videos and first-person testimonials substantiating the media reports pouring out of the country. “Millions of Haitians Face Starvation as Gangs Aim for Total Takeover, Free 5,000 Prisoners,” reads one recent headline. “Haiti Gangs Launch Main Airport Seige, Massacring People ‘Indiscriminately’ Days After Massive Jail Break,” reports another. This weekend’s Washington Post report, titled “Haitians shot dead in the streets and there’s no one to take the corpses away,” paints a picture of the scene on the ground:
The streets of Port-au-Prince reek with the stench of the dead.
It’s a grisly new marker of the violence and dysfunction in this beleaguered Caribbean nation of 11 million people. In the absence of a functioning state, violent armed gangs have taken control of more than 80 percent of the capital, the United Nations estimates. Gunfire crackles at all hours. Residents who dare leave their homes stumble across bodies that have been left where they fell.
Port-au-Prince reached a high of 92 degrees on Friday. The smell of decaying corpses, human rights activists say, has driven some people from their homes. Others have taken it upon themselves to move or burn the bodies. Because who else will?
The situation is grim, even by Haitian standards. (And the situation in Haiti has been varying levels of grim for the past 200 years.) Reports suggest that a gang leader named “Barbecue” — a reference to his enthusiasm for burning people alive in their homes, not to his culinary prowess — is now “the most powerful man in Haiti.” Barbecue’s gangs recently stormed two Haitian prisons and released thousands of prisoners before launching a full-scale attack on Haiti’s main airport. The warlord is facing a challenge from a coalition led by Lanmò San Jou — rough translation: “death has no time” — who hails from a gang by the name of 400 Simpletons and is prone to dressing up as the Voodoo spirit of death. A charming cast of characters, all around.
All this is the culmination of years of violent anarchy in the small Caribbean nation, with brutal gangs controlling and operating substantial chunks of the country, and a corrupt and enfeebled state military and police force that has often proved incapable of doing much to stop them. Today, Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry — who was on a trip abroad to beseech the United Nations for military reinforcement when the recent chaos erupted — is holed out in Puerto Rico, unable to return home. He should count his lucky stars; exile is surely preferable to the fate that met his predecessor, President Jovenel Moïse, who was murdered in his home in 2021.
Spurred on in part by this persistent barbarism, the Dominican Republic, Haiti’s neighbor to the east, constructed a border wall separating the two nations in 2022. The following year, as the gang violence continued to worsen on the western side of the wall, the Dominicans initiated a complete border shutdown, deploying military patrols to secure the borderlands and carrying out mass deportations to repatriate more than 176,000 Haitian migrants. Haitians protested the indignity by burning tires at the Dominican border.
Here at home, the Biden administration has taken more or less the opposite approach. Since fall 2022, the White House has been running a special program allowing up to 30,000 people per month to legally immigrate to the U.S. from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. As of January 2024, the program has admitted more than 357,000 into the country, including 138,000 Haitians (far more than any of the other three nationalities).
Those are, of course, only the numbers from that specific, targeted program. “U.S. authorities encountered Haitians at the U.S.-Mexico border approximately 53,900 times in fiscal year (FY) 2022 and more than 76,100 times in FY 2023,” the Migration Policy Institute reported in November 2023. (Notably, apprehensions don’t account for “gotaways,” who evade apprehension altogether). “From 2019 through 2021, Haitians were the top nationality for migrants crossing the dangerous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama,” the institute continued, “and they have remained among the three largest groups in 2022 and 2023.”
Even now, Americans are subjected to an unending barrage of propaganda regarding the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free, who arrive on our teeming shores. But more often than not, immigrants bring with them many of the practices, beliefs, and general character of their home countries when they come to America. The U.S. border does not possess a magical power to make good Americans of all who cross it. As it’s currently constituted, the U.S. border does not even possess the power to stop anyone from crossing it in the first place. (READ MORE: Opposing Illegal Immigration Is Not About Race)
For all the high-minded talk of “American values,” the simple and obvious truth is that when you import a large number of people from a foreign country in a short amount of time, your country begins to look more like the one those people came from. This is true in all places and in all times: Italian immigration, for example, radically altered the character of America; even now, with the Italian-American diaspora fully “assimilated,” the United States is markedly different than it would have been had they never arrived in the first place.
The same was true of Irish immigration and German immigration (a major source of concern for many of the Founding Fathers); it is true of Mexicans, and Poles, and Scots-Irish, and every other cohort that has come to America from another country in substantial numbers. To ignore that, or to refuse to examine the character of an immigrant’s home — to pretend that all nations of origin are created equal — is to embed a deep and dangerous naïveté into our immigration system.
In every instance, America today is the way it is, in part, because of the character of its immigrants, one in turn formed as the result of the character of the place from which they came. That’s the double-edged sword of “assimilation”: The people become more like their adopted home, but their adopted home also becomes more like them. Americans should think long and hard about what it would mean to become more like Haiti.
