WE: Immigration in Springfield Ohio
Last week, nobody cared what the residents of Springfield, Ohio were going through. This week, everybody wants the residents to shut up, stop complaining and stop being racist.
This article is like the rest of the news reports that are presented if “Haitian immigrants Springfield Ohio” is Googled. All the articles emphasize that Haitians are not eating cats and dogs, or killing geese and ducks. The residents are being pressured into making enthusiastic statements about the Haitian immigrants or get accused of being a racist.
Nobody asks about life in Springfield.
The city of Springfield, Ohio, had roughly 60,000 residents as of 2022.
Since travel restrictions were lifted after the pandemic, between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitians are estimated to have settled in Springfield, according to the latest city count.
Imagine living in a small town that has challenges, but everyone has a sense of how the city works. Residents don’t all know each other, but know what to expect.
In a year, a group of people, equal to a third of the city’s population, come flooding in. Those people are from a French-speaking country where people, on average, earn one-tenth of what they earn in America. The incoming people have little in common with the long-term residents, but since they all came from Haiti, can be a voting block that takes over the town.
Adding that many people will swamp the health care facilities, and it will be worse since the immigrants came from a poor, third world country.
Schools will be swamped with a third more students, most of whom don’t speak English.
Springfield’s culture was swept away and it’s public facilities are overwhelmed, but people act as if anti-immigrant sentiment is the biggest problem. Nobody wants to address the cause of the resentment.
Since February 2021, more than 470,000 Haitian migrants have been encountered at the border, but only 80,000 of them came through illegally. The remainder, 390,000, were intercepted at ports of entry, including an unspecified number who applied from abroad to be paroled into the country through a Biden-Harris administration program that Republicans have criticized as circumventing congressional authority.
In three years, 5% of the population of the poorest country in the Americas, settled in America. How is that good for Americans?
That last sentence means that the Biden-Harris administration brought Haitians to America.
A shortage of entry-level and blue-collar workers made the town a prime place for newcomers, particularly given its low cost of living compared to big cities.
Springfield, Ohio had a shortage of entry-level and blue-collar workers. The free-market solution would be to pay workers more or improve the working conditions. Springfield would become attractive enough that Americans with ambition would move there to fill the good jobs. That would take time, and the town would gradually expand and add amenities.
The Biden-Harris solution was to flood the small town with the poorest people on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. They should be ashamed.