Background
About those naughty immigrants in Springfield, Ohio…
In addition to Tuesday’s debate, Trump held a news conference Friday in which he rambled without evidence about how Haitians had descended on Springfield “and destroyed the place”.
When Haitian immigrants began trickling into Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories in 2017, some thought the new residents could help the city regain its former vigor as a once-thriving manufacturing hub. Once home to major agricultural machinery companies in the mid-20th century, Springfield has lost a quarter of its population since the 1960s.
That helps explain how they were able to find places to live: there must have been a fair amount of vacant housing.
“They came to us for one reason: they were looking for ways to find out how to work,” Casey Rollins, executive director of the St Vincent de Paul Society’s Springfield chapter, said of those who came to the Ohio city from Haiti.
“So we got together immigration lawyers and interpreters to figure out how to help them work. We are getting them online and getting them to apply [for work permits]. We wanted workers here [in Springfield] – they want to work.”
It’s the Rust Belt. It’s been losing people and jobs for decades. Some places, I think it’s safe to assume, are more short on housing and some are more short on jobs, while some are short on both.
Haitians and immigrants from Central American countries have been in high demand at Springfield’s Dole Fresh Vegetables – where they’ve been hired to clean and package produce – and at automotive machining plants whose owners were desperate for workers due to a labor shortage in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Labor shortage. Immigrants in high demand. Trump’s vicious questions answered.
New Caribbean restaurants and food trucks have opened across south Springfield where once abandoned neighborhoods are now bustling with residents. A popular Haitian radio station has been broadcasting for several years. And every May, thousands turn out for Haitian Flag Day that’s celebrated at a local park.
And the phrase “abandoned neighborhoods” is not some journalistic fantasy – it’s a thing that happens, and it’s bad. Detroit, for instance, is just plain rotting away in some nabes.
But there’s a but.
But the glut of new arrivals has also stretched hospitals and schools in the area, angering many locals who resented their presence. The outrage reached a crescendo last August, when an 11-year-old boy was thrown from a school bus and killed after its driver swerved to avoid an oncoming car driven by a Haitian immigrant who didn’t have an Ohio driver’s license.
The child’s death fueled anger and racism on Facebook and at Springfield city commission meetings, where public comments about immigration have often run for more than an hour. Locals upset by the growing immigrant community wondered if they were being taken over – if Springfield had become ground zero for the baseless “great replacement theory”.
Soon, rightwing extremists seized on Springfield’s unrest.
Aaand we’re off to the races.
There’s something uncomfortable in that language, reminiscent of the way gender stuff gets reported. I can easily imagine seeing a story with “racism” and “immigration” replaced by “transphobia” and “the LGBTQ+ community”, and “great replacement theory” by “rapid onset gender dysphoria”.
But racism is bad, while knowing which sex people are is not. I don’t think I understand your point.
The framing just seems, I guess, prejudicial? It presumes an unwholesome motivation on the part of those it describes.
Racism is bad, and knowing which sex people are is not, it is true. But transphobia can also be interpreted as bigotry rather than a simple knowledge claim. Bigotry is bad, while knowing someone’s race is not.
Well, yes.
It’s complicated, and sensitive, and all that. The reality is it probably is uncomfortable to have a sudden influx of X people in a small town, no matter what the “X” stands for. It probably does feel like being displaced or swallowed up. On the other hand in the US most of us are the product of exactly that process. Even some indigenous people are, because their grandparents moved in on people who were Others in some way.
So, yes, it may be not so much racism as generalized feeling abruptly outnumbered. It may be just that change is difficult. It may be a mix of all that.
American history is full of these kinds of fears. The Know Nothing Party was a nativist movement from BEFORE the Civil War. Now we have the internet and nefarious right wing forces to stir things up and make these fears worse.
Maybe it’s better to think of it kind of like gentrification, it’s not that dissimilar… what was a decaying shithole is being revitalized by outsiders much to the area’s economic benefit. While the town’s occupants probably appreciate the economic boost it’s transforming the form their town and community takes, which considering it seems to have been a shithole is a net positive. Problem is humans spend most of their lives changing their environment to suit themselves and then the rest of it trying to maintain it in stasis (less and less realistic as time moves on). Plus we’ve got an ingrained xenophobia that had significantly more survival value to hunter gatherers but is at best a bit counterproductive once free trade became a thing.
Robert Reich:
‘Over the weekend, two hospitals in Springfield were locked down after bomb threats, police said. Other threats received by Springfield officials have forced government buildings to close, two elementary schools to be evacuated and the students moved to a different location, and a middle school to shut down altogether.
‘After JD Vance first began spreading baseless rumors about Haitians in Springfield, members of the neo-Nazi group “Blood Tribe” marched into the city carrying guns, wearing body armor, and carrying Neo-Nazi flags. At an August 27 town hall meeting, one claimed that the city had been taken over by “degenerate third worlders,” blamed Jews for the influx, and warned that “crime and savagery will only increase with every Haitian you allow in.”’
And now Trump seems to be planning a visit, probably with his sidekick, Vance.