Pamela Richey

Haitian Immigration: The Minority Immigrant?

Several years ago I was introduced to a book, Georges Woke Up Laughing, through an anthropology course. It is written by anthropologist Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Fouron, a Haitian immigrant now an associate professor of education in New York, about Georges’ complex life as both a “successful” immigrant to the United States and “long-distance nationalism” he still feels toward Haiti. I became fascinated with the book and the viewpoint of a Haitian immigrant. Without realizing it, I began to soak up information about the Haitian immigrant and began to see a pattern in the documentaries I watched and the articles I read. There was an underlying tone of discontent when the Haitian immigrant was mentioned. I came to understand the underlying tension stemmed from the dual nature of the Haitian Immigrant as both a minority and an immigrant. But what makes the Haitian a minority immigrant?

One of the most obvious answers to this question correlates directly to Objective three--the color code. Haiti is the first and only nation to be created through a slave revolt. From the beginning of the nation’s inception, there was an inherent distrust of white Europeans. On the other side of the coin, Europeans and Americans alike had a stake in seeing this freed slave nation fail. (Diamond and Robinson 29) This led the U.S. and other European nations to withhold financial support to the fledgling country.  The U.S. and Europe argued that the Haitian slaves as black people were unable to govern themselves due to their inferiority to the white man (Schiller and Fouron 102-106). But even if the history and prejudices of the past are taken out of the equation, the Haitian immigrant still lives under the color code and is further marginalized by the fact that white America does not see any divide between minority and immigrant. They see only a black man or woman, not a free Haitian (Schiller and Fouron 38-9). In the U.S., the Haitian immigrant will regularly find him or herself “on the wrong side of the color line” (Schiller and Fouron 93). In many of the immigrants the racial divisions they face in the U.S. only foster nostalgia for Haiti and a society that accepts them as equal (129). Ironically, many of these immigrants are seen as “white” among the family and friends they left behind in Haiti. With education and the perception of money afforded through American education, they become outsiders (125).

Less anecdotal is the data from a study conducted from 1997-2002 by Steve Song, a research fellow of Geary Institute. His study interviewed a sample of students recently immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico, Haiti and China in order to identify their “'identificational assimilation’…defined as possessing a self-image as a plain, unhyphenated ‘American’, and is considered by many the end point of successful assimilation into American society (1006). Song’s research argued that European immigrants were able to leave ethnicity behind whereas immigrants of color were unable to attain the same level of assimilation and that Americans of European descent have created a class system that excludes and keeps the minority immigrant from full assimilation (1008). I focused mostly on the data of the Haitian immigrant in this study, but it was interesting that unlike the other two groups of immigrants the Haitian children interviewed unanimously refused to label themselves in pan-ethnic terms and either labeled themselves as Haitian or Haitian-American. Song suggests that this may be an attempt to separate themselves from the negative aspects of the perception of the minority (1023-1024). This could be an attempt by the younger generation to circumvent the color code.

While race is a major factor in the definition of the Haitian as a minority, the Haitian immigrant assimilation into the dominant culture is also hindered by the pressure to return his or her good fortune to those left behind in a poverty stricken Haiti. According to a BBC News article, the average yearly income in Haiti was $480 a year (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3522155.stm). Most immigrants now are expected to support not only the families they may have in the U.S., but also the family members who made their immigration possible. Those left behind in Haiti depend on the remittances paid to them by family members who have immigrated to the U.S. or by selling the goods imported to them from those same family members (Schiller and Fouron 67-71). Many Haitian immigrants see this as an obligation to those left behind (77). This attachment to home, may in one sense, cripple even those who have acquired the “American Dream” in their attempts to assimilate into the dominant culture.

The Haitian immigrant is pushed into a box through racial discrimination which only serves to increase his or her sense of Haitian nationalism. In tossing the Haitian in the minority slot, the dominant culture pushes the Haitian further into the waiting arms of those left behind. But why did they leave? What has caused the abject poverty that drove them from Haiti? I would like to research American involvement in the influx of immigrants into the world economy as well as American involvement in how the Haitian refugee is greeted?

Works Cited

Diamond, Jared. “All the World’s a Lab: From Poverty’s Origins to the Source of Past Epidemics, Many Things Can’t be Studied Using Standard Experiments- So How Do We Deal With Them?” New Scientist Mar. 27, 2010: 28-31. LexisNexis. LexisNexis Academic.  Alfred R. Neumann Library. 12 Jun 2010.

Schifferes, Steve. “Haiti: An Economic Basket-Case.” BBC News 1 Mar 2004. British Broadcasting Cooporation. 14 Jun 2010 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3522155.stm>.

Schiller, Nina Glick and Georges Eugene Fouron. Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long-distance Nationalism and the Search For Home. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Song, Steve. “Finding one's place: shifting ethnic identities of recent immigrant children from China, Haiti and Mexico in the United States.” Ethnic & Racial Studies 33.6 (Jun 2010): 1006-1031. Academic Search Complete. Ebsco. Alfred R. Neumann Library. 12 Jun 2010 <http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=50218821&site=ehost-live>.