The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Lessons of the Haitian Migrant Cat Scare
Despite scaremongering to the contrary, Haitian immigrants don't eat cats, and have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans. There are some broader lessons to be learned from this epsode.
Over the last few days, there has been an uproar over claims by nativists and immigration restrictionists that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio have been eating cats and other pets. Former President Donald Trump repeated those assertions in the recent presidential debate. As it turns out, the Ohio feline community can rest easy. Both local authorities in Springfield and Ohio's Republican governor say there is no evidence indicating that Haitian migrants in the area have eaten any cats or other pets. At the very least, if such things were happening routinely, we should have substantial evidence of it; and we don't.
More generally, as Cato Institute immigration policy expert Alex Nowrasteh documents, Haitian immigrants (both legal and illegal) actually have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans. And his data doesn't fully control for differences in age and sex; if it did, Haitian immigrants are likely to look even better, as recent immigrants tend to be younger and have a higher percentage of men than the general population (and young men have higher crime rates than other demographic groups). Other evidence shows they have a high rate of assimilation and income growth, which—despite mythology to the contrary —is actually true of recent immigrants, more generally.
There are some broader lessons to be learned from this sorry episode. First, it's important to look at aggregate data, rather than just focusing on a few individual incidents, that may be unrepresentative, even if they happened. As of 2022, there were over 730,000 Haitian immigrants in the United States, and the numbers have risen further since then, as a result of refugee flows generated by growing violence and economic crises in Haiti. With such a large group, it's almost inevitable there are going to be a few who commit terrible crimes. There may even be one or two who ate a cat at some point! But you can say the same thing about virtually any other large group, including native-born Americans, one of whom apparently really did recently kill and eat a cat. Before concluding that any group poses an unusually great risk, you have to look at aggregate data. By that standard, Haitian immigrants are actually less dangerous than native-born citizens.
Even if a group does have an unusually high crime rate, it will usually be wrong to discriminate against them based on racial or ethnic characteristics they have no control over. But at least in such cases we can plausibly argue there is a problem that might require a policy response. There is no such issue in the case of Haitians.
The cat-eating hysteria is even worse than the usual scenario of nativists holding an entire immigrant group responsible for the unrepresentative actions of a few members. Here, it appears the accusation was just totally false. But it is still an example of the more general problem of focusing on dramatic stories rather than more systematic data.
Second, it is a mistake to judge migrants by the state of their countries of origin, assuming that if the latter is awful, that means the migrants will create similar awfulness in their new homes. Haiti is one of the poorest and most violent societies in the Western Hemisphere. But that's not because Haitians are, by nature, somehow inherently violent and lazy. Rather, it's because Haiti has terrible political institutions. Given the chance to live and work in a society with better institutions, Haitian migrants do well, as most have in the US.
Indeed, the history of the US is in large part a history of immigrants arriving from societies with terrible political institutions, and doing well here. If you think that immigration replicates the conditions of the migrants' countries of origin, then the United States should long since have descended into stagnation and tyranny. After all, the vast majority of modern Americans are descendants of migrants from poor and oppressive societies. Yet, far from causing degradation, they have contributed to making American the wealthiest, freest, and most powerful nation in the world.
For a more detailed look at arguments that immigration causes institutional degradation, I recommend Alex Nowrasteh and Benjamin Powell's book, Wretched Refuse: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions. I consider some of these issues myself in Chapter 6 of my own book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.
