"Why Do We Need More Haitians?": The President Grades the World's Countries by Toilet

On Thursday, senators brought the President a bipartisan immigration deal covering, among others, people from Haiti, El Salvador and several African nations under Temporary Protected Status. The President of the United States, in the Oval Office, in front of members of Congress, asked:

He then suggested the United States should instead take more immigrants from countries like Norway, whose prime minister he had met the day before, which tells you how the shopping list gets written. Of the Haitians specifically, per the Washington Post's reporting of the meeting: "Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out."

I. THE ROOM CONFIRMS IT

This is not an anonymous account of a private aside. It was said in a meeting with senators from both parties, and one of them, Dick Durbin of Illinois, walked out and put his name on it: "He said these hateful things, and he said them repeatedly." Lindsey Graham, a Republican who was also in the room, told his colleague Tim Scott the reports were "basically accurate," which in senatorial dialect is a notarized affidavit. Senators Cotton and Perdue, who attended the same meeting, announced they could not recall, a memory condition that afflicts no other forty-minute meeting in their careers.

The President's own denial, delivered Friday by tweet, is a small masterpiece of the genre: "The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used." The language was tough, but it was not the language. Somewhere a logician is weeping into a very fine drink.

II. SAY THE PRINCIPLE OUT LOUD

Strip the profanity and look at the sorting rule, because the profanity is doing the press cycle while the rule does the work. The countries designated as latrines: Haiti, El Salvador, the African continent, rounded to the nearest billion Black and brown people. The country requested by name: Norway, which leads the world in several categories, whiteness prominently among them.

This is not an immigration policy preference. Policy preferences come with criteria: skills, language, family ties, asylum need. This was a wish list organized by complexion, spoken by the man who signs the visas, in the room where the policy is made. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act sorted the world the same way and at least had the manners to dress it up in quotas; this version arrived pre-stripped, in a single vulgar noun.

And for the specific file this site keeps: five months ago the same voice found "very fine people" at a torchlight Nazi march. This week it found an entire hemisphere of countries unfit to send us their people. The through-line is not subtle, and we are not required to pretend it is.

III. A NOTE ON THE WORD

This page prints the word because the word is the record. Newspapers around the world spent Friday agonizing over asterisks while translating it into forty languages (the Norwegians, with some irony, rendered it precisely). The vulgarity is not the offense. Haitians dug their neighbors out of an earthquake with their hands eight years ago this week; TPS exists because of that earthquake. The offense is the ledger beneath the word: which humans are worth having, sorted by where they were born and what they look like. We file the word so nobody can later claim the sentiment was more refined than it was.