First of all, immigrants aren’t eating people’s pets in Ohio.
It’s the sort of thing that should go without saying. The sort of thing that makes you wince a little when you say it (or type it) because it breathes fresh oxygen into a lie that dehumanizes us and desensitizes us and should’ve been starved of air long before it entered the public discourse.
But former President Donald Trump repeated the lie from the presidential debate stage. And when debate moderator David Muir fact-checked him in real time, Trump simply doubled down.
“We checked with the city manager,” Muir said, referring to Springfield, Ohio, city manager Bryan Heck, who confirmed there were no reports of pets being harmed or eaten by immigrants in his town.
“But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there,” Trump replied.
The lie, which originated with a fact-free Facebook post, has also been amplified by vice presidential candidate JD Vance.
Local law enforcement and other officials have tried nipping the rumor in its toxic, polluted bud.
“In response to recent rumors alleging criminal activity by the immigrant population in our city,” Springfield police said in a statement, “we wish to clarify that there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
But the chance to demonize one group of people and stoke fear in another group of people is just too juicy for Trump and his allies to pass up. So here we are.
It’s telling that the party with actual pet horror stories — South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem led her dog to a gravel pit and shot him, according to her own memoir — would turn animal cruelty into a campaign issue. Maybe when the people being accused of the cruelty aren’t from around here, they figure, the stories will sound more sinister.
After all, as NPR reporter Jasmine Garsd adroitly pointed out, there’s a long, sordid history of demonizing immigrants based on what they eat — or are rumored to eat.
“Fear and disgust over immigrant foods has a long history in America,” Garsd wrote in a post-debate analysis. “Italians were once upon a time labeled as ‘garlic eaters.’ Writer Gustavo Arellano has written about how the staple diet of beans led to a slur against Mexicans. The stereotype of the immigrant who eats cats and dogs is also storied, often lobbed against Asian Americans.”
All of which leaves me wondering: What if, in a country as resource-rich as the United States, the dialogue around immigration focused on how we can do the most good for the most people for the most amount of time?
What if instead of looking for ways that we’re nothing alike, we acknowledged all the ways that we are?
What if we looked at people who fled violence and poverty and corruption for a shot at the American Dream and said, “Welcome. Let’s figure out what’s possible here.”
What if we tried to live up to the words etched onto the bronze plaque at the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty?
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
What if we approached a humanitarian issue as large and layered as immigration and acknowledged that regulations are necessary and communities are struggling and current policies are imperfect and also, always, human beings are at the center? Human lives are what we’re debating?
What if instead of weaponizing people’s hunger, we fed them?
It’s convenient to strip people of their humanity when you don’t feel like doing the hard work of figuring out how to help them.
It’s expedient to make up lies that turn people into something we hardly recognize as human, some version of human we’ve never met, some version of human we vow we’d never become.
But we know better. And we can do better.
Because the lies just move us farther and farther away from our own humanity. Farther and farther away from the recognition that we really are in this together. And we really can take care of one another.
It’s both our challenge and our calling. And we shouldn’t tune it out.
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