Immigrants eating your pets is a racist slur since chinese expulsions of the 1800s
Posted by
NPR (aka zeitgeist)
Sep 10 '24, 20:46
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It was obvious that immigration would be front and center during the presidential debate. More surprising was that it veered into bizarre falsehoods about migrants eating pet dogs in Ohio.
For context: in the last few days, Vice President JD Vance echoed a rumor about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people’s pets. Springfield, a city of around 60,000, has received 15-20 thousand Haitian migrants in the last four years. It’s led to tensions, and unfounded rumors about gangs, voodoo practice and yes, eating of cats and dogs. The Springfield police has denied all of this.
Tales of migrants eating pets spread throughout social media like wildfire. President Donald Trump brought it to the debate tonight: "They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats," he said during an answer to a question about immigration. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame." Moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump’s claims, saying there have been no credible reports of pets being harmed Springfield’s immigrant community. But by the time the debate was over, #runspotrun was trending on social media.
The stereotype of the immigrant who eats cats and dogs is storied, and surprisingly found its way into today's presidential debate. Or perhaps it's not such a shocker: In the last few years the rhetoric on immigration from the Republican party has been getting meaner, according to a study from Stanford University. The study used AI to chart the tone of over 200,000 speeches since the 1880s, and found the hostile rhetoric in the way Republican's discuss immigration today is very reminiscent of that used against Chinese immigrants in the late 1800s, when they were targeted by the nation's first country-based restrictions on immigration.
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