Over the last ten days, as Donald Trump and JD Vance have rallied and incited hardened pro-Trump extremists to terrorize the community of Springfield, Ohio, most press reports — even ones from normal publications — have listed the Haitian immigrant population as ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 people. The problem is that that number is almost certainly wrong.
A number of people have brought this up with me, pointing usually to Census Bureau data (which is tentatively updated between the decennial counts). For instance, Kevin Drum did this write up a couple days ago, suggesting that the total immigrant population might be as low as a tenth of the cited numbers. But as Drum himself notes, the problem is that the most recent data is a year or two old. And a significant part of the run up in the size of the immigrant population has been quite recent. So these sources of data are enough to raise real questions about the accuracy of the most commonly cited press estimates but not recent or precise enough to provide a definitive answer or even a more reliable estimate. I’ve been wanting to dig into this myself because there’s obviously been a lot of misinformation on this specific aspect of the story. But I hadn’t yet found the time. Now the folks at The Downballot, the new publication which is the rebranded and now-independent version of DailyKos Elections, has done a deep and systematic dive through all the various sorts of publicly available data to arrive at an estimate of roughly 10,000 Haitian immigrants. As I would expect from them, it’s methodological, non-polemical and comprehensive.
If you’re interested in how they came up with this number, definitely give it a look. It’s an interesting survey just in terms of how one can look at, triangulate and draw information out of different forms of public data. It’s also a reminder of the importance of smart, independent publications. Publications like the Times, the Post, the Journal and a bunch of other places have tens and often hundreds as many journalists as The Downballot but this piece of digging went undone. Those publications deserve at least a few knocks for running with clearly incorrect data. But my point here isn’t to excoriate them so much as to highlight the importance of sustaining a diverse media ecosystem. You need a lot of different kinds of publications, with different sizes, editorial outlooks, unique skillsets to have a broadly informed news environment and citizenry.
Needless to say, the overall story isn’t totally changed if the Haitian immigrant population is 10,000 as opposed to 20,000 or 30,000. But we shouldn’t have a big national conversation based on purported numbers that are two or three times greater than the real ones.
