Since about two weeks ago, after Republican Vice-Presidential candidate J.D. Vance posted a made-up story on social media asserting that members of the Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio were abducting and eating people’s household pets, the community of Springfield has become the target of violent threats. After Vance’s original untrue post, Donald Trump then repeated and exaggerated it further in his debate with Kamala Harris, and has since exaggerated it even further.
The idea that any group of immigrants are eating people’s pets is so absurd and so obviously a racist stereotype that the idea of it should make most people laugh out loud and never again listen to the person who said it. But in the case of Springfield, Ohio that is not what has happened.
In the past week, Springfield city offices, schools, hospitals and other organizations have been threatened, forcing evacuations and closures and event cancellations, and the reassignment of dozens of state police to the city in an attempt to assure safety. The Haitian immigrant residents who work and pay taxes, just like U.S. citizens, are rightly afraid that they and their families might be attacked in the streets. Republican city and state officials have admitted that these rumors are untrue and say that these threats are making it nearly impossible for the city to function normally and safely.
But Trump and Vance won’t stop. Trump reportedly even plans to hold a campaign event in Springfield. That’s because Trump and Vance and other right-wing propagandists are working overtime to sow fear of immigrants in order to win the election.
They are doing something that countless politicians and business owners in this nation and others have done over more than a century to keep working people divided – blame newcomers or Black people or Latinos/as or Asian workers for the economic burdens of working-class people generally.
This not only helps reactionary politicians like Trump win elections, it also performs another important role for capitalists and their system – it takes people’s eyes off the real problem, the capitalists who exploit all of us regardless of our skin color, our place of birth, our gender, or our religion. If they can create enough fear among one group of workers then they won’t unite with other workers to challenge the capitalists or the system over which they rule.
It was capitalists who closed down thousands of factories in the Northeast and Midwest and laid off millions of workers, not Haitian immigrants. It was capitalists who encouraged the opioid crisis that has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, not Haitian immigrants. It’s capitalists who are destroying our planet by continuing to drill, pump and burn fossil fuels, not Haitian immigrants. It is capitalists and their junior partners in Haiti who have pillaged that small nation for a few hundred years, making it the poverty and violence-stricken place that it is, not the Haitians who have fled to Springfield.
Let’s not be distracted by fantastical stories about pet abductions and eating, or about how immigrants are destroying Midwestern towns. The real problem is the profit-driven capitalist system and the people who run it. Let’s turn our anger towards them!
