September 16, 2024

The Real Scandal in Springfield, Ohio

The cats and dogs may be safe and sound, but all is not right in Springfield.

In what ranks as one of the most memorable debate moments in recent history, Donald Trump said that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

No one has yet turned up evidence that this is true, although there is an audio recording of a man reporting that he witnessed four Haitian immigrants absconding with geese from a local pond.

Since everyone is always happy to see geese go someplace else, this call hasn’t made much of an impression on the debate over Trump’s comments, which, true to form, were the most incendiary thing he could say about Springfield.

Even if Tabby and Fido aren’t on the menu in the small Ohio town, the fact remains that a place with a population of 60,000 has seen an influx of 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants since 2020, making the new arrivals a wildly disproportionate share of the population in short order.

Prior to this point, Springfield had nothing to do with Haiti, and looking at the map, a town located between Columbus and Dayton would be one of the least likely places to have anything to do with Haiti. It is very far from Little Haiti in Miami, and it had no pre-existing Haitian population or an infrastructure to provide services to Haitian Creole speakers.

No matter. Under the Biden administration’s open-handed immigration policies, every place in the country has become subject to sudden, disruptive demographic change. We’ve seen it in big cities, where Democratic mayors have complained of the associated burdens, and now we are seeing it in a small city.

To match in relative terms what’s happened in Springfield, more than 2 million migrants would have had to arrive in New York City the past several years.

Numbers matter. No one would care if there were 150 new Haitian migrants in Springfield since 2020, or 1,500. But 15,000 is a different proposition. Quantity, as they say, has a quality all of its own.

To be clear, Haitian immigrants (many permitted here legally under Biden policy) didn’t begin showing up in Springfield hoping to filch unsuspecting domestic short hairs. Rather, they were looking for work in a city that was seeing something of an economic revival. That’s all well and good, but people are more than cogs to be plugged into warehouses or manufacturing operations.

They come with families and with needs for housing, health care and education. They have pre-existing cultural predilections different from ours (Haiti and the United States are very different places), and if they don’t speak the language, that makes everything even more difficult.

Nor are resources unlimited. Health care facilities, schools and the housing stock have all been strained in Springfield.

The New York Times reports that consultations began to take three times as long at the local community health center. The head of the clinic told the paper: “We lost productivity. We had huge burnout of staff.” It hired six Haitian Creole speakers, and annual spending on translation services increased from $43,000 in 2020 to $436,000.

The school district, according to the Times, has had to hire two dozen new English-as-a-second-language instructors, and several interpreters.

The city manager, Bryan Heck, wrote a letter to U.S. senators saying that the influx is “putting a significant strain on our resources and ability to provide ample housing for all of our residents.”

The Haitians also tend to be poor drivers. Ohio governor Mike DeWine has pledged help from the state highway patrol.

News reports often dismiss the concerns of residents as ill-informed or xenophobic. Their complaints about the costs and disorder associated with the wave of immigration are legitimate, though, and the sense that the town has undergone a large-scale change that no one was consulted about is very real. Who signed up to become a laboratory for Biden’s experiment in permitting Haitians to come to and stay in the United States?

The cats and dogs may be safe and sound, but all is not right in Springfield.

© 2024 by King Features Syndicate

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.