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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33936 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Man, that Yahoo article really trips my trigger. JD Vance lied they say! What did he say?

On X, formerly Twitter, Vance amplified bogus “reports” that “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

What's their refutation?

Springfield, Ohio, has been a hub for immigrants, and particularly Haitian immigrants, in recent years — contrary to Vance’s tweet, they are here legally — but there’s no evidence at all for these viral claims.

Whether they're here legally or not doesn't refute the claim that they shouldn't be in this country. Perhaps this is a genuine point of confusion, but I rather doubt it. There are many people that are here legally that I think should never have been allowed into the country in the first place. Their current legal status isn't even an attempt to rebut the claim that they shouldn't be here.

To be fair, a lot of people, including (especially) many reporters are pretty unfamiliar with the broader set of categories of immigration law and status, and Haiti is kinda in the nexus of a bunch of different things. But yeah, there's a lot of tendency for pro-immigration writers to conflate descriptive and normative statements.

Assuming that there are in fact not reports of Haitian immigrants eating cats, then I think it’s pretty fair to say Vance was lying.

Whether “people who shouldn’t be in this country” was intended to imply illegal immigrants or just immigrants generally is unclear, but it’s also secondary to the eating cats thing. That’s the main thrust of what Vance said and it doesn’t seem to be true.

It also doesn’t mean they are here legally. They may be judged to be here illegally in the end.

A large portion of Haitians are under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), with almost all recent immigrants under the humanitarian parole programs (either CHNV or HFRP), rather than asylum parole or parole-with-conditions programs, which makes things... complicated. There are a few ways for someone under these categories to be present illegally, either due to failing background checks or fraud on the part of their sponsors, but it's very unlikely that even a significant portion will be found here illegally.

((And even of those who were originally entered illegally, after ten years 1229(b) kicks in -- that was a big unspoken part of the recent Campos-Chaves v. Garland case.))

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