Trump’s pet-eating Haitians story was just one of his many crazy immigration claims

Andres Oppenheimer

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made big headlines with his false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating Americans’ dogs and cats. But, unfortunately, several other equally ridiculous statements about immigrants that he delivered at the presidential debate drew very little public attention.

Granted, Trump’s fake — and racially charged — assertion that Haitian undocumented immigrants are munching on Americans’ pets in Ohio was astounding. It was not a tangential remark, but an obviously prepared talking point that he delivered as evidence to back up his dubious claim that undocumented immigrants “are destroying” America.

“In Springfield (Ohio), they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country,” Trump said in front of 67 million people who were watching the debate.

Hours later, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, as well as the Springfield police department and the city of Springfield issued separate statements saying they had no evidence that immigrants were eating people’s pets.

The fake story, which had been earlier amplified by Trump’s vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance and Trump fan and X owner Elon Musk, apparently originated from a Facebook page in which a Springfield resident had attributed the story to a neighbor’s daughter’s friend.

But the media focus on Trump’s Haitians-eating-pets story eclipsed several other ridiculous things that Trump said during the debate which neither Democratic candidate Kamala Harris nor the ABC moderators had the time or willingness to rebut that night. Among others:

• Trump said that there are a record “21 million” undocumented people in the United States. This is not true. According to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, there were 11 million unauthorized immigrants in 2022, the most recent year for which figures are available. That was still below the peak 12.2 million in 2007, and amounts to about 3% of the U.S. population.
• Trump said there are “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” Really? “Millions”? That’s nonsense. There is no serious report saying anything even close to that.
• Trump said that undocumented immigrants “are criminals” who are “destroying our country” and driving up crime rates. That’s false. According to FBI figures, violent crimes are near their lowest level in 50 years in the United States. And several studies, including one published recently by Northwestern University, show that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. The last thing unauthorized migrants want is to draw attention from the police.
• Trump said that immigrants “are coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics.” That’s not true. Most undocumented immigrants fill jobs in agriculture, construction, hospitality and other industries that native-born Americans don’t want to do.

There are nearly 9 million job openings in the United States, but only 6.4 million unemployed workers, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If we deport millions, as Trump says he will do, labor costs will rise, and U.S. consumers will pay higher prices for food and most basic services.

What’s more, a new study by the University of New Hampshire says that, by doing jobs that Americans don’t want to do, undocumented migrants help U.S.-born Americans get better jobs. “The unauthorized immigrant dishwasher may well make the job of a citizen restaurant manager possible rather than deny a citizen a job,” the study says.

By now, you may be asking yourself why didn’t Harris counter Trump’s lies about immigration at the presidential debate. The answer is that, most likely, she didn’t want to waste her precious minutes onstage to refute Trump’s crazy attacks on immigrants, because it would have deprived her of time to present her own plans for the future.

And, also, her Democratic party debate coaches probably concluded that it would have been a lost cause because a majority of Americans believe that there is a dangerous immigration crisis.

Instead of debunking Trump’s claims, Harris chose to side with public opinion, and blamed Trump for pushing Republican senators to vote against a tough bipartisan border bill that President Joe Biden was prepared to sign. Harris said Trump asked his party’s legislators to kill the bill because he wanted to keep immigration as a hot topic for the November elections.

None of this is to say that the United States does not have an immigration problem. The fact is that undocumented migration reached a peak in 2023, and that many undocumented migrants — often bused to Democratic-ruled northern states by the Republican governors of Texas and Florida — settled in some cities that were not prepared to receive them.

But what Trump did not say in the debate, and is not saying anywhere, is that the flow of undocumented migrants plummeted this year after the Biden Administration imposed tough new entry restrictions for refugees, or that most immigrants don’t commit crimes, nor take away American jobs, nor will eat your cat for lunch.

What Trump is doing is using the same old fear-mongering tactic he has used since his 2016 campaign: using immigrants as scapegoats in order to create the fiction of a terrible crisis and present himself as the “only-I-can-fix-it” savior. Trouble is, it’s getting to be repetitive, boring, and increasingly crazier.