The government’s delivery of roughly 20,000 migrants to Springfield, Ohio, has been a boon for real estate, local employers, auto salesmen, merchants, and the migrants — but also an unwanted shock to locals as they try to manage their own community.
The damage was displayed at the August 27 city commission meeting where voters presented their concerns about the migrants.
“Maybe we should open up go-kart land again so that people can have a chance to learn how to drive without being on these public streets,” long-time resident Jeffrey Allen told the mayor and four other commissioners.
“I really challenge you guys to get out here and do something,” Anthony Harris, who describes himself as a local YouTube influencer, told the council. “These Haitians are running into trash cans. They’re running into buildings. They’re… flipping cars in the middle of the street.”
“I hate the traffic concerns that you all see,” Mayor Rob Rue said later in the meeting
Across the community, the aisle, all levels of politics, all races, we are concerned about the traffic. I personally am concerned about the traffic. I have almost hit and been hit myself. I have kids that are learning how to drive well, and it is a concern. I have the same fears that you as grandpas and aunts and uncles have. I say this with passion.
City officials are working with state traffic officials, the mayor said:
We’re asking for a program that will focus on reckless operators, speeding, red-light violations, dangerous driving, and we’re going to initiate a 30-day blitz, and this will be highly publicized … to bring attention to the enforcement of driving laws on our roads.
Springfield’s local problems are suddenly a national issue in an election about President Joe Biden’s migration policy.
His successor, Kamala Harris cannot dodge the issue. In 2021, she declined Biden’s request to take a large role in the nation’s immigration policy. Since then, with her support, Biden’s powerful border chief has imported at least 400,000 Haitians into American society:
The vast majority of Springfield’s 20,000 migrants are from Haiti. Most of the migrants crossed the U.S. border illegally — often by pushing through the Panama jungle — and now have been given Temporary Legal Status by Biden’s pro-migration deputies.
The new population has upended the city.
In August 2023, a local child was killed when a Haitian driver without a license hit a school bus and forced it off the road. The man had lived in relatively stable but poor South American countries with his family for a few years before he separated from his family to reach the United States.
The locals say the problems imported by Biden’s deputies go far beyond driving skills.
“They’re in the park grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them,” Anthony Harris claimed.
Anthony Harris said Americans are also being pushed to the back of the line for social services by the flood of welfare-dependent illegal migrants, who are being given access to aid programs after getting parole at the border or receiving Temporary Protective Status after crossing the border. “It’s nothing but immigrants over there,” Harris said about a federal office that offers poverty aid.
“I have a 20-year-old granddaughter who works two jobs, pays city tax, a 23-year-old grandson who also pays city tax and federal, state and all the other stuff,” Lisa Hayes told the council on August 27. “She works two jobs, she’s pregnant, and it took us four months to get Medicaid for that young lady.”
Hayes described a confrontation in a local store as another painful clash of cultures:
I don’t know what kind of label you can put on this, but I’m taking my cart down the grocery aisle, and I have three immigrants strapped across the aisle, seen me coming, would not budge, wouldn’t even and I said, “Excuse me.” Maybe they don’t understand what I was saying, but I’m sure they understood that I was trying to get through that aisle. So I have no recourse now but to bust through it … I would like to see them have some common respect, some common decency. Do not try to bully your way through Springfield, Ohio. It’s not going to work out well. I don’t believe it will work out well at all.
But other witnesses, usually well dressed, praised the inflow of migrants.
“Neighbors and other newcomers I have met have been kind, grateful, hard-working people who want to play a positive role in our community,” said one witness who continued:
A few days ago, I came across an article by the George W. Bush Institute entitled “‘Immigrants and Opportunities in American Cities.” The study noted that immigrants have helped to preserve and revitalize American cities. While welcoming newcomers and helping them adapt does have its costs, these costs are small relative to large economic benefits immigrants bring to the local communities and the national economy. Our new neighbors can learn, earn, and contribute when our cities pursue policies that expand opportunities for everyone, native-born and foreign-born people alike. Everyone benefits in a community with quality schools, safe housing, and access to healthy foods and health care. Last week, Michelle Obama expressed the following sentiments: “We all deserve the opportunity to build a decent life. We need real ideas and solutions that will actually make lives better and ensure everyone has enough. It is up to us to be the solution we seek.” I am willing to be part of the solution, as are many, many others here in Springfield.
Two weeks earlier, at an overflowing commission meeting on August 13, an old resident says she and her husband were being forced out of her home by neighborhood chaos:
Ordinary American citizens lamented the unnerving changes in her hometown, even as former President Barack Obama urged their communities to be transformed by migration:
The Democrats’ Economic Strategy
Biden’s deputies imported the Haitians because they see immigration as vital for the Democrats’ big-government economic strategy, as good for Wall Street, and as an opportunity for progressives to ensure equity between Americans and foreigners.
The civic impact is being felt in many states and towns because Biden’s border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas, has welcomed roughly 5 million economic migrants through the southern border. Breitbart News has described the impact on Whitewater, Wisconsin; Rockland County, New York; and Aurora, Colorado.
The national media portrays the issue as a humanitarian crisis. For example, NPR posted a favorable story in August about the migration that glossed over the civic disruption in Springfield as it inadvertently acknowledged the huge difference between the 20,000 Haitians and the 50,000 Americans in Springfield:
When the pandemic hit, [Haitian Patrick Joseph] lost his job. Unemployed, he watched as Haiti collapsed into gang violence, and decided to migrate to the U.S. Through his work with Royal Caribbean, Joseph had a visa. And someone had told him about Springfield.
…
He says those early days in Springfield felt impossible. He lived in a two-bedroom house, with 15 other Haitian workers. At night, he says he’d call his wife [in Haiti] crying. She’d give him three instructions: “Be careful. Be courageous. Survive.”
Mayor Rue said local business leaders, not local politicians, pulled Mayorkas’s migrants into Springfield.
“There were companies that knew they were going to make an effort to bring in individuals who were crossing the border based on federal regulations that they could do that,” Rue announced in early July. “I’m upset at the fact we didn’t get a chance to have an infrastructure in place if there were going to be 20,000 more people from 2020 to 2025. We didn’t get to do that.”
In a September story, the New York Times frankly described the costs of the Haitian inflow — higher rents, crowded schools, overloaded medical centers, dangerous roads — but played up the claimed benefits:
By most accounts, the Haitians have helped revitalize Springfield. They are assembling car engines at Honda, running vegetable-packing machines at Dole and loading boxes at distribution centers. They are paying taxes on their wages and spending money at Walmart. On Sundays they gather at churches for boisterous, joyful services in Haitian Creole.
The New York Times described one Haitian hire at McGregor Metals, an auto parts manufacturer:
“They come to work every day. They don’t cause drama. They’re on time,” [company owner Jamie] McGregor said.
Among the Haitians recently on the second shift, which stretched to 1 a.m., was Daniel Campere, operating a robotic welder that makes axle components for Toyota trucks.
…
He started at McGregor in June 2021 and now makes $19 an hour, with a 401(k) and health insurance. He has been able to buy a house in Miami, which he rents out. In Springfield, he shares a house with three other Haitian men, who together pay $2,400 in rent.
But the New York Times downplayed the White House’s role in delivering the migrants to Springfield.
Springfield lost a quarter of its population between 1960 and 2014, largely because of the declining auto industry. After 2014, the city recovered as new employers arrived with new jobs. But the new jobs pay far less than the 1960s auto jobs.
In a balanced economy, unemployment is low and the supply of labor is tight. The result is a constant push and pull on a level playing field between employers and customers, employees and their communities. This give-and-take is worked out as employers decide how much to pay in wages, and how much to invest in labor-saving machinery, and as employees decide whether to keep their jobs or move to a better-paying job in a different city.
In May 2021, Biden explained his support for this very popular goal of a tight labor market:
Rising wages aren’t a bug, they’re a feature. We want to get — we want to get something economists call “full employment.” Instead of workers competing with each other for jobs that are scarce, we want employees to compete with each other to attract workers. We want the companies to compete to attract workers … Companies like McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and others — what do they have to do? They have to raise wages to attract workers. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
But Biden very quickly lost control of the border policy to border chief Mayorkas and Vice President Kamala Harris, who had very powerful backers and very different views about wages and labor:
“Regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet the need of employers here in the United States,” Mayorkas told the Senate’s judiciary committee in 2023, adding:
We have employers who are striving to hire, to find people who could fill jobs to contribute to our country’s economic prosperity. Regrettably, regrettably, our legal immigration system is not designed to meet that need of employers here in the United States, despite the fact that individuals from other countries want to come here to work — even seasonally, even temporarily — earn the money that they can bring back to their home countries and support their families there.
Mayorkas used his power at the border to short-circuit this free market by providing the companies with a river of desperate, cheap, and quasi-legal migrant employees that allowed his “Bidenomics” allies to grow the economy, albeit with myriad low-wage jobs and massive federal deficit spending.
Most of the Haitian migrants are not ready for high-wage jobs. At the August 13 meeting, Al Overholser, a local home inspector and computer instructor, told the commission:
I have these Haitians, Somali, Mexican, Spanish [trainees] … With the Haitians, they need extra attention because … they have a kindergarten to second-grade education … [If] they can see something visually — no words, no nothing else — they can learn, and they will learn, but we actually have to step down that low, and that takes a while.
Unsurprisingly, the pro-migration New York Times described the Bidenomics process as something that just happened, not something that Mayorkas did to Springfield and other towns,
By 2020, Springfield had lured food-service firms, logistics companies and a microchip maker, among others, creating an estimated 8,000 new jobs and optimism for the future …
But soon there were not enough workers. Many young, working-age people had descended into addiction. Others shunned entry-level, rote work altogether, employers said. Haitians who heard that the Springfield area boasted well-paying, blue-collar jobs and a low cost of living poured in, and employers were eager to hire and train the new work force.
In 2021, Harris passively accepted Mayorkas’s cheap-labor immigration policy.
In 2024, she promised to continue Mayorkas’s economic policies if elected.
But Mayorkas’s gain is Haiti’s loss. Biden’s migrants include a large slice of the island’s most educated Haitians, trained workers, and also many Haitians who had earlier settled in South America before 2020. Their extraction from Haiti feeds U.S. business and government contractors — but starves the island’s communities of vital police and college graduates.
The alternative policy of shared high-tech growth was outlined in April by Larry Fink, the founder of the $7 trillion BlackRock investment firm on Wall Street:
We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
Donald Trump is promising to restore “The American Dream” by ending illegal migration, deporting illegal migrants, and building up the U.S. manufacturing industry.
Springfield’s Federal Problem
Neighborhood concerns about migration are usually uninteresting to people in Washington, DC, are not recorded in federal crime or economic data, and are rarely covered by the nation’s elite media.
Yet out-of-town migrants can have a large impact on a local community because they bring their own culture and rules from the often-chaotic places where they spent their childhood and teenage years. That disturbance is profoundly alarming to many ordinary people who prosper in their communities and rationally oppose government-imposed diversity with their votes and localized cultural power.
That August 27 meeting also spotlighted another unwanted Mayorkas problem — the emergence of a very small, anti-Haitian racist group named “Blood Tribe.” The group’s appearance in town helps pro-migration advocates paint ordinary citizens as “haters.” The U.K.’s left-wing Guardian newspaper described the appearance under the headline “Neo-Nazi and far-right groups seize on Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric.”
In contrast, most Springfield residents are using social media to calmly share their level-headed concerns about Haitian integration.
For example, a city resident used the Facebook page for Haitians in Springfield to urge the Haitians to adapt to the locals’ different customs and civic rules of suburbia in Springfield, Ohio. The post was quickly deleted:
In a September 8 TikTok video, resident, Dustin Giesel said his auto-insurance rates were raised by the inflow of Haitians:
I live in Springfield, Ohio, where the influx of Haitians are and we had a enormous amount of car accidents because they don’t know how to drive. So now, because that, my car insurance has gone up significantly. I might as well be taking out another car payment at this point just to cover my cars, but the government makes it so that you have to have car insurance. So I thought, you know, I’m going to shop around and see if I can find a cheaper rate. And all of the other insurance companies have given me the same rate, if not more, so I don’t have a chance.
@dustin.geisel my last video was taken down #springfieldohio #fyp
Giesel calmly pointed the blame at the government, not the Haitians:
I’m not at all asking for violence against these people. I know they’re probably, you know, fleeing from something that’s really terrible in their country, but somebody’s responsible for bussing all these people here … I don’t know what you do about it, but the city is freaked out. People are getting pissed.
I personally know someone who was pushed out of their home so that they could pack a bunch of Haitian people into this building and charge the rent more than what you know a single person could afford. I know that when I go to the grocery store, sometimes I can’t get groceries because they’re all gone. I know that we don’t have enough houses in our area for this kind of thing. Our resources are spread thin. Our police are adequate enough to take on all of this. The hospitals are being overloaded.
“We have a problem,” Giesel concluded.
“My hands are tied,” Mayor Rue told the August 27 meeting.
