Back in the summer, we heard about the woes of Springfield, Ohio, a town of 60,000 that has been inundated by 20,000 Haitian refugees, courtesy of the Biden-Harris administration. A similar story can be told about Charleroi, Pennsylvania, another small town where Haitians have become the majority of employees at a local food-processing plant.

Now, there’s another test case in a “red” state. Writing at The Free Press, Peter Savodnik documented the issues in Lockland, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb that has seen its population doubled with the influx of 3,000 immigrants from the African nation of Mauritania. Among other things, Savodnik writes of four-story apartment buildings crammed so full of immigrants that “if the Mauritanians ever leave, the buildings will have to be razed.”

Savodnik, who seems to be the immigration expert at The Free Press — having covered the gaslighting by the media of Kamala Harris as “border czar” and reporting from the border this past April — looked at the issue from the skeptical perspective that Republicans are overblowing the idea of illegal aliens being allowed to vote. The undocumented aliens Savodnik spoke to at the border openly wanted Joe Biden (and, one assumes, Kamala Harris) to win, with one saying, “If it’s Trump, it doesn’t matter how much I work or want to work — they won’t let me in.” Yet the fact is that most won’t risk their tenuous status by trying to vote. At least not knowingly.

Indeed, some warn that these illegals are already registered since they acquired driver’s licenses and other forms of identification, but they will never see their ballots — instead, they’ll be filled out by the NGOs and local Democrat machines and then mailed in to stuff the box. It’s a thought echoed by Donald Trump himself, who said in the debate with Kamala Harris, “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote, they can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

But let’s back up a little bit. Our nation’s history has been one of being the “melting pot,” the place where immigrants from across the globe came to be Americans. Millions came through Ellis Island and settled in ethnic enclaves, particularly in the rapidly industrializing Midwest. Cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Toledo became known for their ethnic neighborhoods of Poles, Hungarians, and Slovaks, among others from central and eastern Europe, and these newcomers took menial jobs to give their families a better life. Sound familiar?

In a way, we’re witnessing the same story over 100 years later but with a twist. While the children of immigrants back then quickly shunned the old country’s ways in an effort to fit in and become American, the process has been slower with modern-day migrants — especially of the illegal variety. Instead of the “melting pot,” today’s process is more like a salad bowl: In order to “celebrate their heritage,” immigrants now try to keep one foot in their home countries. Part of this is the instant communication we have now, but there are also economies that remain dependent on funds forwarded from these migrants to their families back home.

Yet the Democrats who crowed a generation ago that “demography is destiny” and thought they had locked in the Hispanic vote in perpetuity are finding out that the minority vote isn’t as one-sided as they assumed, as working-class Hispanic voters are trending to the GOP. Thus, they’ve attempted to fortify themselves for another generation by opening up the borders to all comers who claim the need for asylum (and government handouts brought to them by the Democrat Party).

But that doesn’t really answer the question: Why Springfield, Charleroi, and Lockland? The answer seems to be in two parts: one political and one economic. To Democrats, it’s obvious that putting a large and dependent population in these states will stop the bleeding of electoral votes and congressional seats, which would otherwise head south to solidly Republican areas. But there are also employers who offer the jobs they claim Americans won’t do. Many immigrants work in the grimy and greasy food processing industry, spending their shifts in a meat locker freezer. As long as the employers are happy and government support for the migrants flows into the town, elected officials will look the other way amidst the squalor and chaos caused by the immigrants. Many of the original inhabitants feel they have no choice but to move away, leaving another living space to be filled by perhaps 10 immigrants (read: Democrat voters).

While Donald Trump will come in with the bluster of stopping the flow and ejecting all those here illegally, the reality is that the powerful people who like the situation will have some say in any resolution. As we’ve seen in reverse with policies tried by the Biden-Harris administration, finding a friendly judge or court is enough to bring even the most strictly constitutional policies to a halt until they wind their way through the courts. Nor is time on Trump’s side. It’s probably unrealistic that he would have more than two years with the GOP trifecta of House and Senate control.

Just like the generation it usually took for an immigrant in days past to have children who became Americanized, we may need a generation of everything going the way of Trump and any successors to finally resolve the issue. If that doesn’t occur, we’ll have to hope this new salad bowl quickly decides to become a modern-day melting pot and thwart the dreams of electoral dominance by Democrats.