Oh, congratulations. This is your Haitian divorce

No tears and no hearts breakin', no remorse!

If you’re a frequent visitor to Muskville these days, you’ll no doubt have already caught wind of the growing controversy in Springfield, Ohio, a city of roughly 70K people, a third of whom are recent Haitian immigrants, with upwards of 20-25 thousand being flown in by the Biden Administration over the last 4 years and granted through a parole program Temporary Protected Status. To hear some locals tell it, many of these refugees are treating the city like they would their own private farmer’s market and hotel: reports of pets being abducted and eaten, roadkill being cleaned and dressed on the sides of roads, and neighborhood park ducks being claimed for food, are not uncommon — though local law enforcement and the city government are calling such charges “unsubstantiated” and denying reports of refugees squatting in houses and yards, even as such events are being detailed publicly by Springfield residents.

Regardless of who you believe, though, what is indisputable is that this unprecedented influx of Haitians in so short a period of time has resulted in severe problems for Springfield, draining limited resources and putting strains on schools and local health care systems. And this predicament — which is not unique to Springfield, as residents of certain Aurora, CO high rises have recently discovered — is tied directly to Biden-Harris immigration policy, which has allowed (and often facilitated) the influx of over 10 million migrants across US borders since 2021, well over 8 million of them illegally.

This much we know.

Which is why the battle over Springfield has become such a hot button issue less than two months before a presidential election. Over on X, a lot of data is being passed around regarding Haitians, from discussions of hereditary cognitive capabilities and average IQ, to data on literacy rates, homicides per 100k population, and average annual income.

The former I take with a grain of salt, given that US progressivism in the early parts of the 20th century fell victim to claims — ultimately undermined by more advanced data — that intellectual deficiency can be usefully tied to hereditary group genetics; H.L. Mencken, once of proponent of hereditary genetic determinism and an oft-cited darling of the “alt right” Klancons, for instance, ultimately rejected the premises most famously laid out in Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), noting “to me personally, race prejudice is one of the most preposterous of all the imbecilities of mankind. There are so few people on earth worth knowing that I hate to think of any man I like as a German or a Frenchman, a gentile or a Jew, Negro or a white man.” (For more on progressive hereditary racialism and how it informed both eugenics and later, Hitler’s views on race, see Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Race).

The latter data, however, is useful, in that it gives us a clearer picture on how the average Haitian immigrant is likely to assimilate in a typical US city.

With Haitian literacy rates far below that of the US, and with Haitian customs and living standards well out of line with that of the typical American citizen, it should be easy to predict a dramatic culture shock both to the immigrants and to the localities asked to host them en masse. And in lieu of what the appropriate methodology should be for inviting migrants into the US — careful screening of the individual seeking entry — generalizations about who Haitians are, broadly, and how they live, typically, are not only worth considering, but are in fact imperative when trying to anticipate potential problems and frictions.

To the left, though, the idea that open borders ideologues should be answerable for the failures of their policy is an affront to the compassion they’ve poured into the project; compassion and reflected virtue become for them the most important component of any plan — as well as the rhetorical hook the left clings to in order to deflect from the various catastrophes that arise from their preening, midwit, fiscally absurd programs.

Once you understand this, MSNBC segments defending Haitian migrants from “misinformation” that connect reports of park duck snatching to some malign racist conspiracy, begin to make sense. Take for instance this morning’s “Reverend” Al Sharpton spot, hosted by an ostentatiously indignant Joe Scarborough and his ludicrous hairstack. In it, Sharpton claims that Republican VP candidate JD Vance — along with Elon Musk and a number of Republican lawmakers — are “mainstreaming” a hatred of Haitians. By extension, Sharpton reasons, these same high-level Republicans are engaging in a racially-motivated distrust of blacks more generally, citizens who — the Reverend Al informs us, as enraptured white anchors bobble their fat heads stupidly — white Republicans evidently see always as a mere step away from returning to their supposed cannibal roots. As if the average NFL Sunday Ticket subscriber is tuning in to an Eagles-Packers game hoping that, should a fight break out, Jordan Love forgets himself and tries to pin down and eat an understandably surprised Kenny Pickens.

By turning the Haitian migrant story into a story of contemporary Republican racial stereotyping and historically racist behavior by the ever latent evil Whitey — though traditionally such whites are firmly entrenched in the Democratic Party — Sharpton and the leftists he Bojangles for deflect from the very real concerns of the citizens of Springfield, whose city has been turned into something they don’t recognize. This deflection is not an accident. It is part of the left’s playbook. Here, the object is to draw a distinction between the virtuous left — who tried and (may have slightly if you kinda squint and if you’re maybe just a little racisty) failed to accomplish the Great Good Deed they putatively set out to do, namely, create a completely inorganic zone in which Diversity is our Strength! — and the uncaring, xenophobic, racist right, who doesn’t care about the travails of the poor and the downtrodden, and who, when allowed to, will reduce those poor noble savages to, well, regular old savages.

To aid in this deflection, Never Trump “conservatives” have dutifully sprung into action to condemn the outrageous! “attacks” on “hard working” Haitians, none of whom they’ve met, none of whose work ethic or living situation they can accurately describe, none of whose culinary habits they can confidently attest to, and none of whom they themselves are being asked to house inside their own tony neighborhoods or fashionable urban villages.

It is this dismissal of the travails of people in communities like Springfield that gave rise to Trump’s MAGA populism, the very political movement these same people hate with such a fervor, yet simultaneously justify by dint of their own dismissive behavior. Ordinary Americans see Uniparty elected officials and legacy media elites on the coasts immediately discount claims made by exasperated citizens at City Council meetings, and they rightly conclude that such people are so invested in their own self-image as compassionate friends to the downtrodden migrant, that what any silly ‘Merican bumpkin has to say about their new unwelcome neighbors is really just residual racism and hyperbole owing to their having been forced out of their parochial small-town comfort zone by the presence of dark skinned persons.

The Trump campaign — and indeed, conservatives more generally — should not fear being labeled racist for laying out the problems with massive immigrant dumps into already established communities. And they have every right to believe the accounts of people who live there and who are witnessing the disintegration of their schools and neighborhoods.

The truth is, all of this is madness — from surreal policy that has resettled a third of Haiti’s population in the US, to government officials, media companies, and disaffected snotty elites running cover for the whole damn project of bringing in both low cost labor (which greatly pleases the Chamber of Commerce Republicans) and reliably Democratic voters not used to liberty (which greatly pleases power-drunk progressives, whose grand plans can only find full realization once they’re able to overturn law and precedent thru sheer numbers and give God powers to the State). The GOP establishment, as we know, doesn’t mind being in the minority. That’s where they do their best fundraising. It’s all one big orgy of ugly and control, anyway.

The problem with Haitian immigrants isn’t that they’re Haitian, necessarily. Rather, it’s a culmination of years of ill-advised immigration policy and ludicrous academic fashion, in which the Spirit of the Age rejected the idea of assimilation for the heady boutique multiculturalism of a cultural “quilt”, a patchwork of connected differences stitched together to create a symbolic fabric hug. The melting pot — rejected by both the progressive left and the Klan right — has been replaced subsequently in academia by the “salad bowl” metaphor, in which disparate ingredients retain their integrity even as they exist together as part of the volume of US culture.

To the alt-right, all we need for a great US revival is to rid ourselves of everything in that rancid bowl save the lettuce. Iceberg. Naturally.

To the left, separate tribal affinity groups can coexist in peace in the great glass bowl of commingled identity — up to the moment they’re shifted to a salad plate, where radishes and onions will inevitably clash, while tomato wedges and carrot slivers form an alliance they hope will bring croutons to power and silence both bacon bits and hardboiled egg slices. Commingling will give way to a hierarchy of veggies and toppings. And eventually, each topping will have its turn as both oppressor and oppressed, creating a paradigm of experiential saladhood for all eternity.

Both metaphors, of course, have it wrong. The “melting pot” model had it precisely right, in fact — as did earlier ideas about immigration and naturalization, with a mandatory emphasis on sponsorship of immigrants and the crucial role of assimilation in the success of the immigrant. This is a diverse country; for it to work, Constitutional order is what needs be restored — not some mythical theocratic nationalism that never existed here.

Winston Churchill will have wanted it this way. And he was a great man, despite what some cartoon frog with a boner for Jewbaiting might whisper into your ear after binging Candace Owens podcasts.

We need to enforce laws already on the books; actively deport illegals; repeal the 1965 Hart-Celler Act; build a physical barrier on our southern border; and put a moratorium on all immigration until we have an adequate count of who exactly we’ve let into this country without discernment or proper examination.

In the end, cutting up a park goose and adding it to the national salad isn’t enriching for anyone. In fact, it’s foreign to us. Off-putting. Alien. And as a result, it’s lending credence to that dangerous contingent of white American identitarians who wish to exist solely on the iceberg lettuce and, if I had to guess, Marvel movies, Stratego, and Andrew Tate pimping tweets. Not to mention it’s fucking gross, we shouldn’t be doing it, and we shouldn’t be allowing anyone else to do it, either, temporary protected status or not.

So there’s that.

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Update: Chris Rufo and Christina Buttons “discovered that the Biden-Harris Administration subsidized the Venezuelan migrants who took over the apartments in Aurora, Colorado, through a funnel of government agencies and left-wing NGOs.”

Buy me a cup of coffee? Lunch? A sports car?