Immigrants have been scapegoated for American concerns for generations
By Peter Certo
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt
cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.
Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to
move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with
impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local
tax base — and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.
Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those
who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their
teeth through empty promises from politicians.
It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it
hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing —
and infrastructure built to support larger populations — can make it attractive
for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize
their new communities.
So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000
Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you
could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started
popping up.”
One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the
[best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a
Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American
workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers
and wages have surged.
Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.
“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro
have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses,
and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United
States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”
In fact, it was earlier waves of migration — including
African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants
from abroad — that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier
prosperity.
But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity
equally. So they lie.
“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant
campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and
corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah
explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own
gain.”
So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled
recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of
internet trolls — that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in
Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.
“According to interviews with a dozen local and county and
officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports,
there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or
specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these
lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called
“Blood Pride” — who are about as lovely as they sound.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes, and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,”
Lindsay and Alliyah point out.
Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering
for someone else — like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities
like Springfield in the first place — all to win votes from pathetic white
nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who
threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a
scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.
Peter Certo is the communications
director of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of OtherWords.org.