At last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump brought up a chilling scene: Haitian migrants roaming the city of Springfield, Ohio, terrorizing the local population and eating their pets. It was a message previously spread by his vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, and other prominent GOP politicians.

One problem: it’s not true, obviously. Local law enforcement and leaders were quick to point out that there are no reports of this happening, and that it all seems to have originated in one unsubstantiated Facebook post. Asked about this Vance only doubled down, further demonizing the local Haitian migrant community.

Some journalists and political observers seem keen on hand-waving away this false narrative as just another example of contemporary political dirty tricks, no different than Democrats mocking Vance with false insinuations about a couch. While we certainly don’t love that these types of lies have become part and parcel of popular electoral communication, there is little equivalence between these things.

The couch is a joke meant to embarrass Vance, a U.S. senator and major-party vice presidential candidate with Secret Service protection. The lies about Haitian migrants are meant to demonize an entire already-vulnerable demographic, following a long-standing and well-established xenophobic playbook that has very real consequences.

The details have shifted — those people will spread Communist ideology, or they’ll assault our women, or they’ll take all of our jobs, or they’ll eat our pets — but the underlying premise is the same: fear thy neighbor, and do what you must to defend yourself from them.

These consequences can be diffuse— drumming up public support for discrimination against Haitians and other Black immigrants in employment and civic participation, for example — or they can be intimate and individual.

Are we going to see violent altercations because someone tried to pet a dog and was accused of having ill intent? This sounds absurd but is entirely possible. We saw anti-Asian hate crimes spike as the coronavirus was wrongly tied to the nation’s Asian-American communities. What will people do when they believe Haitians are out to devour Fido and Fluffy?

It’s not like Trump himself has been particularly shy about his interest in violence against immigrants. He’s spent months pledging a mass deportation operation with the infamous midcentury “Operation Wetback” as an explicit inspiration, and with an arrest target that far exceeds the total number of undocumented immigrants in the country, suggesting a pretty indiscriminate approach.

Last weekend, he upped the ante and made the bloodlust even more explicit, saying that he expected his deportation scheme to be a “bloody story,” all but promising extrajudicial violence against a population that he and his allies have selected as the scapegoats for all the country’s problems.

These aren’t jokes, they’re not throwaway comments and they should not be acceptable as part of normal political discourse. We should not treat them as such and ignore the implications of a major party that’s decided to go all in stoking fear and hatred of immigrants writ large or a subset of them in particular, putting a target on their backs. It is dangerous, and it will lead to something very dark.

The New York Daily News