Springfield, Ohio, has become a very popular subject on chat boards around the country for a few weeks. If they are to be believed, some residents of the small town are complaining about Haitian immigrants kidnapping waterfowl from local parks and bushwhacking neighborhood cats for dinner. Don’t know how true the stories are, or to what extent they might be, but I have seen citizens of Springfield complain to the town council that not only is this going on, but Haitians are being gifted driver’s licenses and then tearing up the roads to the tune of several accidents a day.
Haiti is a very poor country and has been the home of unstable governments for decades. Most people don’t own cars, and those that do have questionable driving habits. I have never been to Haiti, but I have been to neighboring Jamaica, and those guys make the chase scene in “Bullit” look like two dudes pumping pedal cars quite feverishly. You’re on a one-lane road that carries traffic in both directions, and some guy coming up from behind wants to pass you. He gives you a little double beep on the horn and hammers down whether there’s room to get over or not. He either succeeds, or one of you winds up in a sugarcane field.
Now, residents are not happy with any of this, and it has come to light that Springfield, Ohio, has been the repository of some 15-20,000 Haitian migrants in the past couple of years. If this was Chicago or New York, it might be a drop in the bucket. But in Springfield, Ohio, population 60,000, this many new residents in such a short time is, well, pretty much the whole bucket.
And this has created a few problems as first-world people strive to coexist in a town with a lot of third-world people in a very short span of time. You have the language barrier, the culture barrier, the driving barrier, and the “What in the hell happened here?” barrier. You can’t blame the American residents for scratching their heads. They didn’t have any foreknowledge that new neighbors were about to descend on their town and swell its population by 30 percent. Or that their infrastructure of schools, hospitals, social services, and law enforcement were about to get buried.
Or that jobs would be taken by the newcomers, or that people would be moved out of their rental properties to make room for them. You see, when the government brings in a lot of new people, it gives them a lot of public money and assistance. So when you have cash to spend, landlords don’t renew leases with their old people. Instead, they raise the rent and take in the new people. If you’re a single mother of three earning $28,000 a year at Quik Trip and suddenly you have to move out to make room for somebody just off the boat with federal cash in hand, well, it probably kind of screws up your life. According to Reuters, rents have increased by 130 percent in the last year alone.
In the early 2000s, we saw something like this happen in St. Louis as tens of thousands of Bosnian refugees moved in. They began moving into my neighborhood overnight and right from the airport. Nice people, friendly people, but I had to wonder how they could afford middle-class affluence right off the bat after having fled a war-torn country with just the clothing on their backs. I finally got a town alderman to talk to me, and he just said it would never be publicized, but the Bosnians got cash from the feds. Lots of cash.
Okay, well, I don’t begrudge anybody the right to take part in the American Dream. I think it’s something unique about this place and a big part of our collective history. You start small, you become educated, you work hard, and you become comfortable if not well off. Along the way, you play by the rules of society and take on its core tenets of fair play, neighborliness, and social responsibility. You work for that. It’s something that you build during your lifetime. However, for immigrants wanting to participate in the American Dream, you come here legally, and you work for your stuff. You might get a little bit of government help, but you don’t get the keys to the store. These Haitians came here illegally and then were given a waiver from the law by the government. And money.
JD Vance: ‘An Illegal Action From Kamala Harris Doesn’t Make an Alien Legal’
KJP Tries to Gaslight Everyone on Whose Fault It Is That Springfield, OH,
Is Overwhelmed by Haitians
Currently, it looks like the residents of Springfield are getting moved to the back of the bus by having their resources redirected, their jobs snapped up and their roads turned into demolition derby tracks. Funny thing about the government. They do stuff like this, but never announce it ahead of time. They just plop these folks down in your town in the middle of the night and expect you to deal with it. Don’t like it? Xenophobe. Bigot.
Some people think that the residents of Springfield are racists for criticizing Haitians. However, blacks have lived in Springfield for decades, and it doesn’t seem to have been much of a problem, so I think this issue is more about behavior than race. In fact, the black residents there seem to be just as upset as anyone else because of the things that are going on with all of these new arrivals.
Randy Smoot, a black resident, writes about it here in the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Stop telling Springfield residents we’re not allowed to be frustrated by Haitian influx.
This guy seems perturbed:
Springfield, Ohio Residents Voice Anger Over Influx of Haitian Migrants at City Commission Meeting.
Newsweek says:
Springfield is Emblematic of America’s Immigration Death Spiral.
There’s more, but you get the idea. I’m not sure that these “migrants” are being evenly distributed throughout the country by the government. Springfield has gotten a 30 percent bump in the last few years…Has Martha’s Vineyard? Chevy Chase, Maryland? Silicon Valley? I can’t find evidence on the web that they have, and I wonder why? Don’t those communities have the tax bases to provide services, jobs, and housing for them? At least more so than the residents of Springfield? Of course it’s a rhetorical question, but it does point to something disingenuous going on by whomever is driving this particular bus. And it appears that whoever is driving this bus is not interested in letting its passengers get off in the affluent communities of the country.
I wonder why? No, really, I don’t wonder why.
Politicians are making these kinds of decisions, and probably, there are some Republicans favoring cheap labor along with Democrats who are as well, but I think there are bigger reasons why. And since the Democrats are driving the impetus to increase illegal immigration, they get to take primary responsibility for making this our new reality. I don’t think there is really a way to un-screw this anymore.
Progressives like to point at conservatives and lampoon “The Great Replacement Theory” as if it is some Mighty Imaginary Plan of Conspiracy.
“Oh, look at all of those xenophobes and bigots. They hate anybody who is non-white and looking for a better life here. The Statue of Liberty and give us your poor…blah….blah…blah. What a bunch of racists.”
They forget the fact that at the time of the great immigration to the US in the mid to late 19th century, the same time as the erection of the Statue of Liberty, the government turned you away if you had no skills, were a criminal or likely to become a ward of the state. And if you had communicable sickness, they put you in quarantine for about 40 days….anyway.
If nothing else, progressives are generally poorly educated, illogical, and driven by emotive reasoning. I think they lack the ability to see more than one side of an argument because if their own is so virtuous, how could they ever be wrong? So when they criticize conservatives on this issue, the first thing they do is assign motive because that’s what drives their own positions.
“I want everyone to partake in the American dream no matter what color they are…I’m a good person. You want to exclude people different from yourself; you’re a bad person.”
Works for them. And it allows them to scoop up more just like themselves. Bumper Sticker Logic is one-dimensional, shallow, and draws in the young and inexperienced. “Join us, we’re young, cool, and hip!”
*Note the difference between the Progressive Bubble and the Conservative Tent. The bubble is hermetically sealed. The tent allows air (read: different ideas) to pass through.
So, to begin with, understand that the first priority of a politician is to get another term. The next thing to understand about a politician is that he/she never does anything out of the goodness of their heart. Some might be good people, and probably are, but as for the way they do business, I just don’t believe they do something unless it serves themselves. I’m not saying this is always bad; I think it’s just the way it is.
So, when progressives want illegal immigration, you can be assured it’s not because they feel empathy and love for those people. If it is, then it’s more empathy and love than they feel for their own countrymen (which is weird), but more likely because it benefits their own campaign. Do they think more people will vote for them if they appear kind-hearted? Maybe. If progressives run on virtue signaling, then they’re counting on your desire to appear virtuous, too, by voting for them and then telling everyone about it. But I don’t think in the halls of power, Democrats are going to leave that to chance. I am of the opinion that their pragmatism leads their thinking and that they are breaking the border for two reasons.
1. They don’t think America will vote for their stuff in numbers sufficient to win elections anymore, so we need different Americans who will. Especially if they are beholden to the Democratic Party for letting them in the front door.
2. They want to get Americans dependent on government largesse so they can always have the ability to turn off the spigot if we get too uppity. See: the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Act, where middle-class communities/suburbs don’t receive any more federal funds for civic development if they fail to comply with government quotas for minorities in their neighborhoods. And if they don’t on their own, government-subsidized housing is coming in.
So the plan is to trade away the team and get enough new players so they can win the pennant year after year. I don’t have any proof to demonstrate that this is true. And that’s because none exists. They don’t advertise it, so you have to use your own powers of deduction to figure it out, but for the life of me, I cannot see any other reason why they would do this. If the Democrats keep power, look for amnesty and then citizenship for 20 million “new Americans” occurring in the next administration.
And for the people of Springfield, their new residents, although in place now under temporary status, likely aren’t going anywhere…ever.
