Despite scaremongering to the contrary, Haitian immigrants don’t eat cats, and have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans. There are some broader lessons to be learned from this episode.
The cat-eating hysteria is even worse than the usual scenario of nativists holding an entire immigrant group responsible for the unrepresentative actions of a few members. Here, it appears the accusation was just totally false. But it is still an example of the more general problem of focusing on dramatic stories rather than more systematic data.
https://reason.com/volokh/2024/09/12/lessons-of-the-haitian-migrant-cat-scare/