Member Newsletter
I continue to have what I guess I would call a mild confidence that not just the Trump campaign but some amount of the political press is missing the political valence of the situation in Springfield, Ohio — the point I alluded to in this post from yesterday. But I want to zoom in on one aspect of the story. Trump and Vance are obviously telling a really lurid and ugly story about half-savage outsiders being foisted on a town of hard-working Americans from the Heartland. But even a lot of the non-far-right coverage has operated on the assumption that either the federal government or some outside entity has essentially resettled a large community of refugees in this one city. But that’s not really what happened here at all. The influx of immigrants into the city is actually a direct result of economic redevelopment plans devised by local leaders, most of whom are Republicans.
Springfield, Ohio is one of those prototypical dying Rust Belt small- to mid-sized cities. Old industries disappear. Young people leave for regions with more jobs and opportunity. That creates a downward spiral of economic decline, faltering public services and depopulation. The city has been losing population for half a century. Town leaders made a concerted and fairly successful effort to bring in new light industry, supply and distribution hubs and so forth and new workers to take those jobs.
It worked. A substantial number of those new workers were Haitian immigrants. As often is the case, members of one immigrant group put down roots in a community — often for fortuitous or random reasons — and then that attracted more members of that community. It’s a story as old as America. Newcomers to America from one country or region usually head to areas where members of their religious or ethnic or national community have put down roots. There you can take advantage of extended family networks, have connections with people from the same home town, navigate employment and government bureaucracies with people who speak the same language. Again, it’s a very old American immigrant story. In Springfield, the economic revitalization has worked better than anyone imagined. But it also became a kind of show-piece for Great Replacement fanatics. And then Trump and Vance pounced.
It’s also true that this kind of rapid growth causes growing pains, even as the larger story is one of success. I noted two days ago that the number of Haitian immigrants in the city seems to be dramatically lower than most press coverage has suggested. But even a 10 or 20 percent run-up in population in a few years is a big deal. There are increases in the public assistance and Medicaid rolls. (It’s important to remember that especially in the post-Obamacare era, Medicaid rolls aren’t a proxy for joblessness or people being on the dole: it’s how our system provides health insurance coverage for lots of lower- and moderate-income employed people.) There are more kids in the public schools needing English as a foreign language instruction. Another part is a little more obscure to me — how much is real versus anecdotal. But it seems like the new workers have also helped drive up rents. Again, the hard evidence of this seems a little unclear to me. But it’s hard to see how that wouldn’t be the case at least to some extent if you have significant population growth over a short period. But the big picture story is a lot of new businesses which are thriving and a lot of people working in them — many of them recent immigrants from Haiti who are recent arrivals in Springfield.
I’m telling you all this not just to tell a happy story about this city. My point is more specific. When I first saw the city’s political leaders trying to tamp down the hysteria whipped up by Trump and Vance, I assumed this was just responsible town leaders trying to calm a volatile or even dangerous situation. It’s that too. So good for them. But it’s even more that what’s going on in the city is actually the result of those political leaders’ own planning and and the outcome that they were trying to achieve. That kind of population growth, especially when it includes a lot of foreign language speakers, is going to cause some tensions — that’s just the world we live in. But that’s not most of the story. What Trump and Vance are doing would be just as ugly if this really were a case of a large number of refugees being resettled in one town in Ohio. But that’s not what’s happening at all.