Haitian immigrants find new footholds, and familiar backlash, in the Midwest, South

By Tim Henderson, Stateline.org

Fortified with work authorizations and a new freedom, Haitian immigrants are moving out of their longtime strongholds in Florida and New York, often finding good jobs while remaining wary of how they will be received in new places in the Midwest and South.

This movement helps explain why Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have become embroiled in the presidential election. For several weeks, Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have spread untrue rumors about Haitian immigrants in the city eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.

Until recently, “we were counting Haitians in the dozens,” said Leonce Jean-Baptiste, who helped launch the Haitian Association of Indiana in 2008. The association’s aim: “just making sure that our children would know there is such a thing as Haitian culture, that their parents come from a very strong, very rich culture and ethnic background,” he said.

Now, the association has its hands full helping new arrivals with housing and learning the ways of the Midwest, Jean-Baptiste said. Immigrants are coming to fill factory jobs in Indiana, a trend that started in the pandemic.

“Here in Indiana, in Ohio, in the Midwest in general, the manufacturing industry was desperate for labor and so it was a perfect kind of marriage,” Jean-Baptiste said. “Haitians were looking for jobs, they might have lost a low-paying job in a hotel in Florida, they can’t access government benefits because they’re not citizens, and here they can do better.”

With more Haitian immigrants free to work legally anywhere because of work permissions granted under the Biden administration, many moved from off-the-books jobs in Florida or New York to factory work in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia.

Those states had some of the most significant increases in Haitian immigrant population between 2019 and 2023, the most recent estimates available from the American Community Survey, according to a Stateline analysis.

In that time, the Haitian immigrant population in Indiana increased eightfold, to 12,465; almost fourfold in North Carolina, to 7,752; more than doubled in Texas, to 7,010; more than tripled in Ohio, to 5,264; more than doubled in Virginia, to 6,342; and nearly fivefold in South Carolina, to 2,569.

Meanwhile more established strongholds where the most Haitian immigrants live are seeing less growth: New York (up 5%), Florida (up 1%) and Massachusetts (down 1%).

“The situation in New York is that the cost of living and the cost of housing is shutting out the new Haitians. They are moving where there are jobs and there is housing — I know people who have gone to North Carolina, South Carolina,” said Francois Pierre-Louis, a Haitian-born professor of international migration studies at the Queens College campus of the City University of New York.

Those staking out new territory in the Midwest tend to be more established immigrants who already know enough English to get by, Pierre-Louis said.

“To be able to move to the hinterlands, you have to have a level of cultural understanding of the U.S. to be comfortable,” he added.

‘It’s always been a struggle’

In Florida and New York, where about two-thirds of the country’s Haitian immigrants still live, more established immigrants with their own memories of discrimination are helping new immigrants get established.

Mayor Alix Desulme of North Miami, Florida — the city with the highest concentration of Haitian Americans, about 38% in recent years — recalls being taunted as a boy when he arrived in Brooklyn, New York, by people who falsely believed Haitians were spreading AIDS.

“I’m an immigrant and I am a Black man. These things do not go away,” said Desulme. “We’re in a state, Florida, where the governor would like immigrants to go elsewhere. It’s always been a struggle for us as a people, but we came to this country for a better life.”

Dr. Pierre Arty, a Brooklyn psychiatrist born in Haiti, said politically motivated denigration of Haitians has an impact that he’s trying to mitigate in his work with new immigrants for Housing Works, a Brooklyn nonprofit. It happened in the 1980s with AIDS and it’s happening again with false narratives about pet-eating, he said.

“We have social media with quick distribution of false information, negative memes about Haitians and offensive jokes. It can foster inferiority complexes and shame as opposed to pride for being part of this community,” Arty said.

“This fosters dehumanization and resurrects historic Black tropes of us being less than animals,” he said. “Imagine what this can do to the psyche of children when other people make fun of them.”

Growth in Haitian immigrant communities since mid-2023 is hard to gauge, but clearly has continued in some states.

Clark County, Ohio, where Springfield is located, saw an increase in Medicaid enrollment by people with Haitian backgrounds, based on their choice of Haitian Creole language, from about 3,000 in mid-2023 to almost 8,000 in July 2024. The number dropped to about 7,200 in August, according to the county’s Department of Job & Family Services.

The number of immigrants in the community is likely much higher since not all of them have Medicaid, and the Medicaid numbers will likely continue to drop as more get jobs, said the department’s director, Virginia Martycz.

In Indiana, Jean-Baptiste thinks the number of Haitian Americans and other immigrants has increased to 30,000 from the roughly 14,000 counted by the American Community Survey last year, based on contacts to his organization and social service reports based on names.

‘A little more mobility’

In New York, as in Florida, an established community is helping new immigrants get settled before moving on to areas with more jobs and more affordable housing.

“The work authorization is a ticket to a little more mobility,” said Daniel Jean-Gilles of Nyack, New York, where he is part of a wave of earlier Haitian immigrants trying to support newcomers. “I see a lot of new faces here. They come and stay here with family and friends while they wait for work authorization and then they can move around and get that job. I hear about people moving to North Carolina, Arizona for jobs.”

“Housing and jobs are very limited here. They have to go where the jobs are,” said FritzGerald Tondreau, an immigration attorney and child of Haitian immigrants who works in Spring Valley, New York.

Tondreau showed videos of brutal beatings and executions by gangs in Haiti, posted by the gangs to intimidate enemies and families of hostages, and said gangs have set up roadblocks demanding money on major roads. “This affects every facet of life in Haiti and makes it very untenable,” he said.

Work authorization is available to many Haitian immigrants, either as part of the federal temporary protected status for unauthorized immigrants or because of humanitarian parole for those waiting for asylum hearings if they crossed the border legally and don’t have a serious criminal record, said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Many Haitian immigrants are taking advantage of a new federal program that allows them to travel directly from Haiti if they have a sponsor willing to support them during temporary humanitarian parole.

Temporary protected status, first granted to Haitian immigrants when their nation was deemed too dangerous for return in 2010 because of earthquakes, is now held by an estimated 200,000 Haitian immigrants, second in number only to Venezuelans.

The status was recently extended until 2026 by the Biden administration and could theoretically end, but that’s not likely, Gelatt said. The Trump administration tried to end temporary protected status for Haiti and some other countries, but the policy was blocked by lawsuits until the Biden administration reversed it.

The bottom line, Gelatt said, is that many new Haitian immigrants are protected from deportation and are able to work legally for the time being, but few have a path to permanent legal residence and citizenship.

“This temporary status affects their sense of integration, their willingness to invest in their futures in the United States,” she said. “They can never be sure that they’ll get to stay.”

Over decades in the United States, without a clear path to citizenship for many, Haitian immigrants have learned to make peace with uncertainty.

“The thing is to wait a long time and be good citizens and stay under the radar,” said Pierre-Louis. “And most Haitians are good citizens. They go to church and they work. They want to work. They’re not here begging for anything.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.