![]() Hate-filled social media posts and voice messages shared by Bahamians on Facebook include rumors about “packs” of Haitians roaming flooded areas of the island, looting and robbing abandoned buildings. The chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Dorian has exacerbated anti-Haitian sentiment in the Bahamas, I found. Many Bahamians even think Haitians have a proclivity for violence. Widely held stereotypes portray Haitians as a burden on the Bahamas’ economy and a strain on its health care, education and social services systems. I heard Bahamanians associate Haiti with poverty and low education, and its workers with illegal status. Though people in both the Bahamas and Haiti are predominantly of African descent and share a heritage of colonization and slavery, many Bahamians look down on Haitians. In research for my 2014 book on the two islands’ long, intertwined history, I found that Haitians have long faced discrimination and stigmatization in the Bahamas. AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa Anti-Haitianism in the Bahamas Haitian migrants displaced from their home destroyed by Hurricane Dorian outside a church shelter in Abaco, Bahamas, Sept. Haitian women braid hair, wait tables, sell goods on the street and serve as cashiers at duty-free liquor stores and gas stations. The Bahamas depends on Haitians to farm, landscape, clean hotels, paint houses, fix cars, work in construction and bus restaurant tables. Haitians usually do the jobs that local Bahamians do not want to do. Many earn the minimum wage of US$5.25 an hour or less. Since obtaining a foreign work permit in the Bahamas is an onerous legal process that requires an employer sponsor, most Haitians workers are undocumented. ![]() Its average per capita income of $21,280 a year eclipses that of Haiti, where annual earnings average $1,800.Īccording to the 2010 Bahamas census, there are approximately 39,000 people of Haitian descent living there. The Bahamas is a comparatively wealthy Caribbean country with a booming tourism industry. In recent decades, Haitians have gone to the Bahamas to find work. The majority of migrants came from the lower classes of Haiti’s poorest regions, my research finds. By 1969, the population had doubled to 20,000. In 1962, there were 10,000 Haitian migrants in the Bahamas, according to author Keith Tinker – about 15% of the country’s total population. ![]() This wave of migration accounts for the prevalence of French surnames like Delaveaux, Duvalier, Moncur and Poitier among modern Bahamians.īetween 19, Haitians escaping the political violence of the Duvalier dictatorships also fled to the Bahamas. In the late 1790s, Haitians sought refuge in the Bahamas from the upheaval of the Haitian Revolution, when enslaved Africans on the island rose up against French colonizers to create the Americas’ first free black nation. Haitians have been going to the Bahamas, a nation of over 700 islands and keys about 530 miles northeast of Haiti, for centuries. “We want you out of our country,” shouted other protesters, holding Bahamian flags. Issacs Gymnasium in Nassau, according to Eyewitness News Bahamas. He had staged a protest outside the hurricane shelter set up in the Kendal G.L. “The Bahamas is for Bahamians,” said Operation Sovereign Bahamas’ founder, Adrian Francis. ![]() That includes at least 340 Haitian migrant workers deported since the storm, according to Giuseppe Loprete, chief of the Haitian mission of the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency that defends the rights of migrants. 1, 2019, a nationalist group called “ Operation Sovereign Bahamas” is demanding the Bahamian government evict hundreds of Haitians from a shelter for hurricane victims.Īn estimated 76,000 people in the Bahamas were left homeless after Dorian rendered parts of some Bahamian islands uninhabitable. In the Bahamas, which was flooded and flattened by the Category 5 Dorian on Sept. Haiti wasn’t on Hurricane Dorian’s slow-moving path of destruction across the Caribbean in early September, but Haitians are suffering in the storm’s aftermath anyway. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |