The influx has sparked a racist, anti-Haitian campaign orchestrated by U.S. immigration officials and the big-business media. The Haitians are blamed for “taking American jobs” and “spreading disease.”

In recent months, hundreds of Haitians have been arrested by the government of the Bahamas, which is also using them as scapegoats for unemployment. As a result, more than 500 Haitians braved the dangerous trip to Florida in June alone. Since last October, U.S. immigration officials have picked up more than 4,500 Haitians.

Haitians have fled their homeland by the thousands to escape the brutal Duvalier dictatorship there. Rather than face imprisonment and death if forced to return by the Bahamian government, thousands of Haitians are seeking refuge in the United States.

The trip can be fatal. In mid-July a boat full of refugees capsized off the Bahamas, and twenty-three Haitians—including nine children younger than ten years old—drowned.

The victimization of Haitian refugees in this country is consistent with Washington’s political support to the Duvalier regime. The U.S. government pours out millions of dollars of aid each year to prop up the right-wing tyrant.

Contrast the attitude toward Haitian refuges, for example, to the U.S. rulers’ eagerness to welcome refugees from Vietnam, Cuba, and other countries whose governments they oppose.  
 
August 10, 1953
OAKLAND, Calif., Aug. 1—Some 25,000 members of the Cannery Workers Union, an affiliate of the AFL Teamsters, went on strike July 28 against the California Processors and Growers, Inc., shutting down 68 canneries in Northern California that process 95% of the food canned in the state.

The union demand for a 10-cent across-the-board increase plus five cents for a health and welfare fund was rejected by the association after five months of negotiations. Their counter-offer was a 6-to-10 cents wages increase plus the welfare plan—a difference of three cents on the package deal.

Conditions for unskilled cannery workers are among the worst in the state. Base pay ranges from $1.24 an hour to $1.96. Employed only at the height of the fruit-canning season, the majority of workers are women.

Many workers on the picket lines have expressed disappointment at the low demands made by the union in face of the needs of the membership, yet the ranks are solidly behind the union in this struggle.

So justified is the strike action that even the boss’s press finds it embarrassing to attack it.  
 
 
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