Guess where else has a growing Haitian population? Lexington, let’s welcome, not vilify them | Opinion

Fignole Charles has lived in Lexington for the past 27 years, crafting as close to an American dream as it’s possible to imagine.

He came to this country as a refugee from Haiti 27 years ago during one of that country’s nearly constant upheavals. He started in Orlando, Fla., but a friend suggested he try Lexington instead.

He got a job at a distribution company in Winchester, got married, had four children, bought a house in Masterson Station and paid it off. In May of this year, he and his brother opened their own business, JF Bongout Bakery and Grocery on Winchester Road.

“We don’t make a profit, but we survive,” he said. “Next year, we’ll make a profit.”

The shelves are stacked with soda, flour, Haitian candy and bags of fresh bread. You can order some specialties like chicken patte, chopped up chicken, peppers and other vegetables in a buttery crust.

He was recently joined at the store by his nephew, who arrived from Haiti three months ago under a federal humanitarian program for Haiti, which is now in turmoil since its president Jovenel Moise was assassinated in 2021.

The nephew didn’t want his name used.

“It’s very bad there right now,” Charles said. “Things go on you can’t imagine.”

Like everyone else, Charles has heard about Springfield, Ohio, where a growing Haitian population has become the target of right-wing demagoguery by vice-presidential candidate JD Vance (Ohio’s junior senator) and former president Donald Trump, who during the national debate, accused Haitians of eating cats and dogs.

“This is not true,” Charles said sadly. “We don’t know why he comes up with this.”

Lexington welcomes refugees

Charles is right. It’s not true, which Vance admitted on national television on Sunday, saying he needed “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.”

The only suffering right now is in Springfield, where thanks to Vance, bomb threats have shut down schools, colleges and festivals.

What is true is that big influxes of legal immigrants can strain local resources. But only at first, said Mary Cobb, director of the Lexington office of Kentucky Refugee Ministries.

“The economic data are clear that the process of welcoming refugees really pays off,” Cobb said. “When someone comes, there’s some initial outlay such as a food stamps. But it doesn’t take long before people are off those benefits and they have repaid more than they took out because of taxes.

Groups like Kentucky Refugee Ministries prepare refugees by giving them language and cultural readiness classes, and finding them jobs.

“They start a life, they start businesses, the economic generation that’s generated is much more positive than a drain,” Cobb said.

In February, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a new study that found between 2005 and 2019, refugees and asylees had a positive net fiscal impact on the U.S. government totaling $123.8 billion. “The net fiscal benefit to the federal government was estimated at $31.5 billion and approximately $92.3 billion to state and local governments.”

In the past 23 months, Cobb said, Lexington has welcomed refugees from Afghanistan, Belarus, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Iraq, Nicaragua, Rwanda, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. They receive legal protections as refugees and asylees.

An asylee is a person who has been granted asylum. They are authorized to work in this country, may apply for a Social Security card, may request permission to travel overseas, and can petition to bring family members to the United States.

“These are people who are seeking protection because their life is at risk,” Cobb said.

In 2023, about 200 Haitian refugees came to Lexington; in 2024 that number rose to 338. Those who come from Haiti, which is basically now ruled through gang violence, have faced poverty, violence, and sometimes torture.

“These people have faced trauma and torture,” Cobb said. “This is forced to flee. But they have the kind of resilience and grit we want in the community — they’re resourceful and ready to work because they’re hungry to rebuild a life.”

Lexington has been largely welcoming of refugees from all over the world, maybe because people recognize they bring vitality and diversity to our state, as well as strengthening our work force.

Historic scapegoating

But refugees and immigrants can quickly become scapegoats in the kind of political discourse we’ve seen in the past week.

Haitians in Florida and other places learned that to their detriment during the AIDS crisis. In 2018, then President Donald Trump asked why we had to take immigrants from “shithole countries,” like Haiti.

Haiti and the United States have a long and involved history ever since Haiti overthrew French colonial powers in 1804 and became the first country run by the formerly enslaved, said Mark Curnutte, a journalist and author of several books about Haiti who now teaches at Miami University in Ohio.

“My experience in Haiti is they are a remarkably kind and gentle people given the really soul-crushing obstacles they face,” said Curnutte, a former Cincinnati Enquirer reporter.

“There are no opportunities in their country, which is why you have a great deal of migration. They want to work and support their families, and they will send money home in an expatriated economy, which is how a lot of people survive.”

Haitians have been persecuted in the U.S. and elsewhere. But they are part of a long history of political scapegoating that goes back centuries, according to Karen Petrone, a University of Kentucky history professor who specializes in the Holocaust.

In the Middle Ages, Jewish people were accused of blood libel, the killing of Christian children as a kind of “religious othering,” Petrone said. “That kind of othering then became very useful to politicians as they built nationalism in their countries.”

In Springfield, an 11-year-old boy was in an accident caused by a Haitian immigrant. Shortly after that, rumors started about dogs and cats being taken and eaten.

Karen Petrone is a history professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in the Holocaust and K-12 Holocaust education. She’s alarmed by the similarities in the kind of rhetoric she sees about Springfield immigrants and what happened in 1930s Germany.

“By the time Nazis began to kill people, the idea that Jews, Roma, and others did not deserve representation or even life had taken hold,” Petrone said. “That’s how this dehumanizing rhetoric works, and this kind of rhetoric could be deadly for an immigrant in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

As he and Vance begin to make immigrants look “inhuman,” Trump has also threatened a massive and “bloody” deportation process for immigrants, along with the threat of mass detention camps.

In addition, Haitians are othered because of their race.

“It is not an accident that all of this is picking on a Black immigrant group and not Ukrainians,” Peterone said.

That’s why it’s so important to call out people like Vance over obvious scapegoating and lies.

People like Fignole Charles are what give America its exceptionalism; at whatever point in history, nearly all of us arrived in this country as immigrants and started to build lives.

But immigrants are an easy target for immoral politicians, who think scapegoating people will achieve their political gains.

We’ve seen how well it worked in the past in other countries; we should not let it happen here.