When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns, including nearly every major city in Ohio. 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.
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So it was in Springfield, where up to 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, including language barriers and strains on public services. 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, J.D. 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 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 neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride” — who are about as lovely as they sound.
Vance has since admitted that he “created” the story, but both he and Trump have continued to make vile threats against Haitian Americans and other immigrants in Springfield and beyond.
Those lies led to bomb threats, hate speech, and vandalism targeting Haitian Americans and their neighbors in Springfield, leaving many to wonder about their future. “Everything was okay for me,” Haitian immigrant Rinaldi Dessalines told the Ohio Capital Journal. “I can say my experience was amazing” in Springfield before the right-wing campaign. But now “it’s like an earthquake, not only for the Haitian community, it’s for everybody.”
These absurd lies aren’t just bad for Springfield. Immigrants from all over have helped revitalize neighborhoods in Dayton, Akron, and Cleveland, while Cincinnati just posted its first population growth in decades almost entirely due to immigration.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out. They point to studies showing that the far right’s anti-immigrant measures could cost the economy $7 trillion over the next decade.
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.
“We know who we are, and we know why they say what they say,” said Daniel Geffrard, another Haitian American from Springfield. Many Springfield natives appear to understand this dynamic as well, and they’ve flocked to Haitian churches and restaurants in recent weeks to show support for their neighbors.
Although life took me elsewhere in Ohio, stories like that are why I’m proud to call the Dayton-Springfield area home. Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.
A shorter version of this op-ed appears at OtherWords.org. It was updated and expanded for In These Times.
