Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The US government does not welcome Haitian immigrants, who have one of the highest deportations rates. The United States Marines invaded Haiti in 1915 and militarily occupied the country to 1934, nearly two decades. Two generations of Haitians grew up under US military occupation, which was oppressive and often violent. The majority of Haitians are desperately poor, and a large percentage are homeless in their own country following the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed nearly a quarter of a million people. For eight years, from 1916 to 1924, during the same period of the occupation of Haiti, the border country of the Dominican Republic was also occupied by the US military. In both countries, chaos, instability, and impoverishment resulted in emigration, much of it undocumented, to the United States. Historian Ryan Fontanilla, who also served in the US Coast Guard, had the unsavory task of participating in the rough and often violent pursuits of Haitian asylum seekers crowded in rickety boats attempting to reach US territory. He writes that the legal structure of Coast Guard techniques is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade. “A disquieting intuition repeated in my head: the USCG cutter, the Haitians’ sailing vessel, and European slave ships represented a triad of homologous instances in which people of African descent have suffered involuntary concentration in small spaces upon the Atlantic. I dreaded that I was in closer proximity to the enslavers of the past, an...