Here is the transcription of my most recent video blog:
(And here’s the audio on AnchorFM)
Hey everybody, this is Queen Mab, and what good is having a vlog if I do not use it to talk about issues that are important to me? And today, I would like to talk to you about why we need to let the Haitian immigrants in. I should say Haitian refugees, because that’s what they are. They are leaving a country that is unsafe for them, and the Biden administration has even declared that Haiti is unsafe for Haitian nationals, so it makes no sense whatsoever to send them back.
So I feel very strongly about this because I’ve been to Haiti. I was there in the summer of 2011, and I was teaching at some music camps. And it was a very intense experience, and it was a very wonderful experience, and I have to say that Haiti is a wonderful country with a lot of really wonderful people in it. And the reason that Haiti is so poor is because it has been completely screwed over by white Western powers – including the United States – for pretty much all of its existence.
And if you’d like to know more about this, I’m gonna recommend two resources. The first one is an Instagram post that was on Antiracism Daily (@ardtakeaction), and it was a repost from another Instagram account called @knowyourcaribbean. And it basically showed the history of how Haiti has subsidized the United States for almost all of its existence. We literally would not be a nation if France hadn’t taken the money that it extracted from Haiti, which at that time was its colony, in order for us to fight for our independence, okay? So that’s a big one. And then we were France’s debt collector, okay? We got paid to make sure the Haitians gave France the money that was supposed to buy them their freedom, which is kind of a ridiculous concept, okay?
Another really good resource to learn about this is a book called The Uses of Haiti by Paul Farmer. Now, I’m gonna admit, I haven’t read it, but I’ve talked about it extensively with folks who have read it, and I spent some time when I was in Haiti at Zanmi Lasante, which is the community hospital and health outreach program that Paul Farmer started in Central Haiti. So that book will explain to you why we owe Haiti. We absolutely owe them, and we need to let them in, okay? There’s no excuse for what’s been going on at the Southern border.
Honestly, I also think we need to let in the Central American immigrants as well, because the whole reason for all the gang violence and all the drug violence and all of that is number one, our drug problem, and number two, the fact that we’ve been interfering in the governments of Latin American nations for oh, I don’t know, all of our history, which is why they haven’t been able to develop stable governments. So we need to make an amends, and the way we need to do that is by taking care of people who are running away from the violence that we had a hand in creating.
Another really good Instagram account to check out is @borderangelsofficial. Border Angels is a really cool organization that does a lot with helping migrants, and they are the ones who showed me how to take action today, because they had a phone number on there…let’s see if I can find it here…that you can use to call your representatives to tell them to stop deportation flights to Haiti. And that number is 202-224-3121. And if you just put in your zip code, it will send you to your representative’s voicemail or to a live person, and you can let them know that you’d like them to urge them to call DHS and ICE and tell them to stop all deportation flights to Haiti. And they have this nice little script on their Instagram that will tell you everything to say, okay?
Thank you very much for tuning in today. If you’d like to know more about me and what I do, you can go to my website: queenmabmusic.com. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, and call your congresspeople! See you next time.