LAfter a half-hour of Tuesday’s presidential debate, former President Donald Trump deployed an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that newcomers eat other people’s pets and pests.
“They’re eating dogs, they’re eating people that came in, they’re eating cats,” Trump said of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Over the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of nearly 60,000, most of them through the legal resettlement program. “They eat the pets of the people who live there and this is happening in our country and it’s a shame.”
Although city officials confirmed they had received no such reports and the unsubstantiated claim quickly drew condemnation, false claims about Haitians eating pets went viral on right-wing social media and were quickly spread by conservative lawmakers. Ohio Sen. and vice presidential candidate JD Vance wrote on X Monday about reports of “Haitian illegal immigrants” kidnapping and eating pets and causing “general chaos” in Springfield.
People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new to their community, and experts say the “dog-eat-dog” trope is a fear-mongering tactic white politicians have long used against immigrants of color, especially Asians.
“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior is a very quick-hanging fruit to encourage xenophobia,” said Anthony Ocampo, a sociology professor at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona.
Demonizing immigrants with lies about their diet is a political tactic that originated in the late 1800s, when anti-Chinese sentiment was at its peak, said May-lee Chai, an author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign issued trading cards that featured cartoons of Chinese men eating rats and, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, labeled his opponent Benjamin Harrison as a “Chinese presidential candidate.” .
“It’s a very old political trick to dehumanize Chinese immigrants and portray them as a threat to white American workers,” Chai said. Chinese workers were not only a “labor menace” in the restaurant industry, but also a “civilizational menace,” she added, since one reason for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “browning of America.”
The urban legend that Chinese restaurants serve dog, cat or rat meat dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the US. An 1852 Mississippi newspaper editorial, for example, laments that trade with China “is not what it ought to be,” before saying, “And besides, the Chinese are still eating dog pie.”
The Chinese may have been the first immigrant group to be widely profiled as “dog eaters,” but the slur was soon directed at other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.
At the World’s Fair in 1904 in St. Louis organizers allegedly forced the native Igorots of the Philippines to kill and eat dogs for fun, an event that cemented the stereotype against Filipinos. By the end of the 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians had become “basically stereotyped as dog-eaters.”
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More recently, in 2016, Oregon County Commissioner and US Senate hopeful Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting” dogs and cats for food. And last May, a false claim that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat led to months of harassment and the subsequent closure of the business.
The “Asian eating dogs” myth has persisted for so long, Ku said, that if Trump had targeted Asian immigrants instead of Haitians, the public outcry might have been more subdued. “The fact that the slur was somehow directed at Haitians confused a lot of people,” Ku said, “because Haitians, as far as I know, have never been stereotyped as dog eaters before.
Because animals like dogs and cats are considered “honest people” in the U.S., Ku said, slurs like “dog eater” or “cat eater” carry serious consequences. When Trump portrayed immigrants as a danger to pets, he “actually portrayed immigrants as perpetrators of the most cruel or heinous act that is humanly possible — cannibalism.”
Stereotyping Haitians as savage pet eaters could lead to an increase in racial violence, experts say. In Springfield this week, bomb threats led to the closure of City Hall and schools. Republicans also rallied around the death of an 11-year-old boy — hit by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant while on a bus — to further demonize the community. Nathan Clark, the boy’s father, asked Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain.”
“If you think a group is wild or uncivilized, it’s much easier to scapegoat them and enact harmful laws against [them]Ocampo said.
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