In the mad scramble to establish whether or not immigrant families are eating people's pets and wild ducks and geese in parks, the obvious answer is being ignored: Of course they are! What world are you living in if you think they can't be?
After the United States retreated ignobly from Southeast Asia, we were flooded with refugees from that part of the world. "Flooded" is a relative word; the numbers I can find vary, but it appears that it was around 125,000 people before we closed our doors except for the purpose of reuniting families. Which, of course, is a trickle compared with the multiple millions of people coming in now, from all over the world.
There were naturally plenty of difficulties settling so many Southeast Asian refugees and integrating them into our communities, but there were some significant differences between then and now that made that process generally successful.
- Sheer numbers, obviously.
- Comparatively speaking, their entrance into this country was well-regulated.
- As refugees were brought here, they were sponsored by families, churches, and other groups that took responsibility for helping individual refugee families find places to stay, gain employment, learn or improve their English, navigate paperwork, and get their children enrolled in schools. In addition to that, the sponsors provided much-needed friendly relationships, often long-lasting, in an alien and frightening environment.
- Their presence in our country was clearly legal, greatly reducing the refugees' vulnerability to enslavement by gangs, pimps, unscrupulous employers, and crooked cops, lawyers, and judges.
- Again, the numbers. Small numbers of immigrants, relative to the population, can be assimilated and integrated into the host society without causing massive disruption. There is a difference between a summer storm and a category 5 hurricane.
What does this have to do with eating cats? Everything. Even with the relatively small, orderly, and successful assimilation of the "boat people" of Southeast Asia, people are human. They have problems. They lose their jobs, drop out of school, fall victim to unscrupulous predators, are tempted by illegal activities, or can't handle their money well. Especially as time goes on and the social safety net is not so focused and robust. And don't forget that while many of the Southeast Asian refugees were middle class workers who spoke English, many were also "country bumpkins" with no knowledge of Western culture. They weren't stupid people, but they were smart in their own culture; being dropped into an American city made them as vulnerable as I would be if I suddenly found myself in the jungles of Laos.
So some of them were hungry, and they did what hungry people do: they used the skills they had to find food. They fished in the rivers, not knowing and not caring that the rivers were polluted. The hungry belly does not concern itself with mercury levels. They discovered that squirrels abound in city parks, and squirrels make good eating—or so I'm told. Here, we rely on our local hawks to keep the squirrel population under control; back then, refugee families took care of that. I am not making this up.
If you flood an unprepared—and maybe unsuspecting—city with a large population of migrants who do not fit into the culture, who may not even speak the language, and who have no responsible sponsors to welcome them, some of them are going to be hungry. And they are going to do what they have to do to get food.
They're going to help themselves to ducks found conveniently living on city ponds. If they're hungry enough, they're going to eat cats without a second thought for whose pets they might be. Maybe they come from a culture that is too poor to imagine keeping pets and treating them like family members.
Of course they're going to eat pets, and whatever else they can find.
So far, I have yet to hear anything that suggests this is true.
And yet, you seem to be doubling down on one of the candidate's remarks, trying to make it seem like his comments aren’t a problem because, after all, it must be happening. The Haitian community must be killing and eating peoples pets because they have to. But his was not a message of understanding and compassion. Instead, he used fear mongering to put a target on their backs.
Your topic is a red herring distracting us from what should have been the real focus. That a man who is running for the highest office in the country is intentionally demonizing a community that deserves our compassion not our hatred.
If you read anything but compassion in my post, please read it again. I'm speaking from personal experience of a time, and a clash of cultures, that I lived through, up close and personal. If it happened then, under much more controlled (and compassionate) circumstances, I cannot imagine that it is not happening now. If not in one particular town in Ohio (and the jury is still out on that), then elsewhere.
While this may not be widely known outside of Florida, pets here are far more likely to be eaten by the hungry, and it's definitely not immigrants, but the native-born, who are doing the damage. Take care of your pets, wherever you live.
I don't think I said YOU were not compassionate. Instead, I feel like you are giving the candidate an "out". That you believe what he said is most likely true, so it was okay for him to say it. If he had said it from a place of compassion, then maybe, but his rhetoric is dangerous.
There have been no indications that members of the Haitian community are eating peoples pets and his comments have caused fear in the community and bomb threats that have closed schools and city offices.
Assuming that by "the candidate" you mean Donald Trump—when I hear him, I hear compassion. Sometimes voices calling out injustice can sound angry—and rightly so.
Having, as I said, lived through a time and a place where immigrants have struggled to survive, let along adjust to a vastly different culture, I know that compassion is a right response. But as far as I can tell, a grave injustice has been done to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio, and they also deserve compassion.
Our town is similar in size to Springfield, and I know that we could not handle a sudden population increase of 40%, which Springfield has been asked to do, even if that 40% were not an impoverished population from a foreign country and a totally different culture. Our own infrastructure is struggling to handle the fact that our officials somehow thought it was a good idea to give developers permission to erect multiple huge apartment complexes in an area that was already a couple of decades ago considered built out and stable. And we were generally a prosperous community to begin with. I cannot imagine what Springfield is going through.
I'm glad someone is angry enough to ask why this is happening, how Springfield suddenly ended up in this situation—and in what other American communities is this happening. I'd like to start with the factory rep who complained that he needs Haitian refugee workers because "Americans are too lazy and don't want to work," and move upward from there. That sounds suspiciously like the excuse southern plantation owners gave for why they needed African slaves.
Central Florida has absorbed plenty of Haitian immigrants, along with those from many other countries. They were for the most part fine people who managed well the difficult task of honoring their own culture while assimilating well into their new home. But numbers matter. I love spicy foods probably more than most folks, but whether it's cinnamon or garlic or hot pepper sauce, the right amount can greatly enhance a dish, but too much makes it unpalatable and indigestible. And if I choose to add hot sauce to my own meal, that is a far different situation from someone coming into my home and requiring me to serve every dinner "Thai hot."
You hear compassion when he spreads falsehoods about peoples pets being eaten? Or when he consistently repeats the incorrect phrase "illegal aliens" when he refers to the Haitians in Springfield? Or when, in his AZ speech, he repeated the false claim that dogs were being taken and he said "These people are the worst". Really?
