Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, is siding with President Joe Biden’s policy of delivering government-funded illegal migrants to Springfield’s employers — instead of the citizens who are losing jobs, wages, and civic stability.
“These people are here legally,” DeWine told ABC’s This Week on September 15. “They came to work … these are good people.”
On Wednesday, DeWine told CBS:
These Haitians came in here to work because there were jobs, and they filled a lot of jobs. And if you talk to employers, they’ve done a very, very good job and they work very, very hard.
Brian Heck, the nonpartisan city manager of Springfield, Ohio, also ignored the migration-caused economic worries among the citizens when he spoke on September 15, “Our commitment to promoting a business-friendly environment has attracted new enterprises to our region, and we will continue to focus on collaborating with industry leaders who seek to establish [businesses] here.”
Employers are snapping up the migrants who are subsidized by the federal government and worried they may be sent home. “I wish I had 30 more,” Jamie McGregor, the owner of a low-tech factory that manufactures metal components, told PBS.
Donald Trump, however, announced on Sunday that he would end Biden’s policy of importing wage-cutting, rent-spiking Haitians for government-subsidized jobs.
The migrants are being delivered via Biden’s refugee programs and parole programs, including the CBP One app for migrants, as well as migrant flights for jobseekers from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Since 2021, Biden’s deputies have imported 10 million immigrants via legal, illegal, and quasi-legal routes. The inflow has included more than 400,000 migrants from Haiti.
Roughly 200,000 Haitians were pulled out of the country via a 2022 parole program created by President Joe Biden’s migration czar, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas. This Extraction Migration policy is pulling many trained people — such as graduates, police, and textile workers — from Haiti, leaving the country more vulnerable to political instability and criminal gangs. GOP legislators say this inflow is illegal because the parole program in the nation’s immigration law was intended for emergency use in small numbers.
The remainder of the Haitian inflow are illegal migrants — often poorly educated — who were released into the country instead of being detained until their asylum cases were decided, as required by federal law. Mayorkas is also providing the released illegal migrants with work permits, federal aid, and employment subsidies via his award of “Temporary Protected Status.” The TPS award does not change the migrants’ status as illegal migrants.
The migrants are not filling jobs that Americans will not do. They are used by employers to fill new and older jobs because of incentives in the government’s Bidenomics economic policy.
In a normal economy, investors create jobs after adding up the cost of workers and their machines in a fair labor market. However, the government’s subsidies and status make the illegal migrants so cheap to hire that companies can profit from low-value jobs that cannot survive in a free market. Without the subsidized Haitian workers, those companies would have to pay better wages to Americans, upgrade their workplaces with more productive technology, or not create low-value jobs.
Those same subsidies also encourage companies to fill productive jobs with cheap migrants instead of Americans.
Bidenomics is also boosting real-estate investors who profit from the high rents enabled by federal grants to the migrants. The extra housing costs are not a problem for many migrants who are willing to share rooms and reportedly get housing subsidies from the government,
Kamala Harris has repeatedly promised to enshrine those policies in law.
The federal supply of migrants and their subsidies are hurting Americans’ ability to earn decent wages and afford decent housing.
The supply of migrants also forces local Americans to live with civic chaos, such as zoning violations, traffic hazards, and civic conflicts — caused by migrants unfamiliar with U.S. society.
In his ABC interview, DeWine ignored the skewed labor market and praised the Haitians as “good workers.” But he said he would try to reduce some of the civic chaos, such as a lack of funding for the migrants’ many healthcare issues.
[The migration] raises a couple questions. One is a health issue. As you know, Haiti is not a country that has very good health care, and since the assassination of the president several years ago, the doctors who were there — many of them, most of them — have already left. So you’ve got people coming in from a country that doesn’t really have good health care. And so it raises issues about getting them vaccinated, getting their children vaccinated. So it’s put a real pressure on primary care.
And so what we announced yesterday was try to take [actions ourselves, to] see if they’re eligible [for federal vaccinations]. If they’re not, we’re going have to spend it ourselves and put about two and a half million dollars in to assist the local community to expand that primary health care.
The other problem is driving. Again, Haiti is not a country [where] many people don’t drive at all. There aren’t that many cars per capita. And people who do drive in Haiti are very, very different than they are in the United States. My wife Fran, I’ve been in Haiti a number of times and driving [there is] just very, very different. So the challenge is to get driver training for these individuals so that when they do go on the road, you know they will be they will be safe. We have a law in Ohio that says that once you turn 18, or if you’re over 18, you can get a driver’s license in the state — you have to pass a test, but you don’t have to have any driver’s training, which is kind of a big loophole in our law. It’s a real problem.
Heck also promised to deal with the civic issues, not the skewed markets for housing and jobs:
While we are experiencing challenges related to the rapid growth of our immigrant population, these challenges are primarily due to the pace of the growth rather than the [pet-eating] rumors being reported. These rumors will not distract us from addressing the real strain on our resources, including the impact to our schools, healthcare system, and first responders.
“We need help, not hate,” elected Mayor Rob Rue told MSNBC on September 13, when asked about rumors of missing cats that have roiled the city. But at the end of the MSNBC interview, Rue recognized how Biden’s migration skewed local rents against Americans:
We’ve had another issue with houses being sold to large LLC [investors], they’re buying out many, many, many houses and then displacing folks that have been faithfully paying rents and then, and then from that. moved in immigrants because they’re paying higher rents and they’re exploiting the rents. That’s happened in Springfield. Folks are coming to tell me, “I’ve been displaced. I’ve been told I was evicted because I can’t pay a higher rent.” That’s unfair too.
In both TV interviews with DeWine, the TV hosts focused on claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating the residents’ household pets.
But DeWine also endorsed Trump, saying, “I think if you look at the economy issues, and these are issues that I think the American people are most concerned about, I think that Donald Trump is the – is – is the best – is the best choice.”
