“This fosters dehumanization and resurrects historic Black tropes of us being less than animals,” he said. “Imagine what this can do to the psyche of children when other people make fun of them.”
Growth in Haitian immigrant communities since mid-2023 is hard to gauge, but clearly has continued in some states.
Clark County, Ohio, where Springfield is located, saw an increase in Medicaid enrollment by people with Haitian backgrounds, based on their choice of Haitian Creole language, from about 3,000 in mid-2023 to almost 8,000 in July 2024. The number dropped to about 7,200 in August, according to the county’s Department of Job & Family Services.
The number of immigrants in the community is likely much higher since not all of them have Medicaid, and the Medicaid numbers will likely continue to drop as more get jobs, said the department’s director, Virginia Martycz.
In Indiana, Jean-Baptiste thinks the number of Haitian Americans and other immigrants has increased to 30,000 from the roughly 14,000 counted by the American Community Survey last year, based on contacts to his organization and social service reports based on names.
‘A little more mobility’
In New York, as in Florida, an established community is helping new immigrants get settled before moving on to areas with more jobs and more affordable housing.
“The work authorization is a ticket to a little more mobility,” said Daniel Jean-Gilles of Nyack, New York, where he is part of a wave of earlier Haitian immigrants trying to support newcomers. “I see a lot of new faces here. They come and stay here with family and friends while they wait for work authorization and then they can move around and get that job. I hear about people moving to North Carolina, Arizona for jobs.”
“Housing and jobs are very limited here. They have to go where the jobs are,” said FritzGerald Tondreau, an immigration attorney and child of Haitian immigrants who works in Spring Valley, New York.
Tondreau showed videos of brutal beatings and executions by gangs in Haiti, posted by the gangs to intimidate enemies and families of hostages, and said gangs have set up roadblocks demanding money on major roads. “This affects every facet of life in Haiti and makes it very untenable,” he said.
Fortified with work authorizations and a new freedom, Haitian immigrants are moving out of their longtime strongholds in Florida and New York, often finding good jobs while remaining wary of how they will be received in new places in the Midwest and South.
This movement helps explain why Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have become embroiled in the presidential election. For several weeks, Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have spread untrue rumors about Haitian immigrants in the city eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.
Until recently, “we were counting Haitians in the dozens,” said Leonce Jean-Baptiste, who helped launch the Haitian Association of Indiana in 2008. The association’s aim: “just making sure that our children would know there is such a thing as Haitian culture, that their parents come from a very strong, very rich culture and ethnic background,” he said.
Now, the association has its hands full helping new arrivals with housing and learning the ways of the Midwest, Jean-Baptiste said. Immigrants are coming to fill factory jobs in Indiana, a trend that started in the pandemic.
“Here in Indiana, in Ohio, in the Midwest in general, the manufacturing industry was desperate for labor and so it was a perfect kind of marriage,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Haitians were looking for jobs, they might have lost a low-paying job in a hotel in Florida, they can’t access government benefits because they’re not citizens, and here they can do better.”
With more Haitian immigrants free to work legally anywhere because of work permissions granted under the Biden administration, many moved from off-the-books jobs in Florida or New York to factory work in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.
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Those states had some of the most significant increases in Haitian immigrant population between 2019 and 2023, the most recent estimates available from the American Community Survey, according to a Stateline analysis.
In that time, the Haitian immigrant population in Indiana increased eightfold, to 12,465; almost fourfold in …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
