Springfield is Emblematic of America’s Immigration Death Spiral | Opinion

In 2018, Brad Pepper, the vice president of automotive steel parts manufacturer Topre America Corporation, sounded smitten when he announced his decision to take over the former International Harvester/Navistar plant in Springfield, Ohio. “So it wasn’t just about the site,” Pepper said. “It was also about the community and the stories heard about the legacy of the site. It actually put a little nostalgia there, as well, that kind of made it, I guess, a good romance for our company and the community to come together.”
City Commissioner Dr. David Estrop enthusiastically agreed with Pepper’s ardor for Springfield and its people. “Springfield has a lot to offer,” he said. “It has many amenities. Best of all are its people and the heart of its people. They never give up. They’re resilient. Our community, the people in it want to be part of forging a new history for our community, and that’s very exciting.”
The city’s residents needed someone to believe in them. Between 1970 and the early 2000s, Springfield’s population had declined by over 30,000. The Greater Springfield area had suffered a 27 percent drop in median income. For a city and region devastated by manufacturing jobs offshored to Mexico and Asia, this was exciting news.
But today, a new threat is endangering the livelihood of Springfield’s citizens: Employers are actively displacing the domestic workforce by hiring newly-arrived immigrants from Haiti. All this at a time when 7 million American men between the ages of 25 and 55 are unemployed, and almost three quarters of the U.S.’s employment growth has come from immigrants since 2019.
And not everyone is embarrassed to admit it.
“I wish I had 30 more [he currently employs 30 Haitian workers,” CEO Jamie McGregor of Springfield-based McGregor Metal, explained it this way during his PBS News Hour interview. “Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine; they’ll achieve their numbers. They’re here to work. And so, in general, that’s a stark difference from what we’re used to in our community.”
How did Springfield get here? Simple: Mass immigration and chain migration during the Biden administration, as a direct result of Biden’s immigration policy.
In 2020, the last full year of the Trump administration,1,207 Haitians were apprehended at the U.S. southern border. Contrast that to the first eight months of 2021 under the Biden administration, when 47,255 Haitians were apprehended. These numbers are staggering and they’re getting worse.
Presently, more than 211,000 Haitians have been approved for the Biden administration’s Process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans parole program (CHNV) and have been granted work permits. And under certain legal statuses, the CHNV program allows an immigrant who is already in the U.S. to potentially sponsor another immigrant.
In short, any one of the Haitians currently working at McGregor Metal could if they wanted to sponsor and parole one or more of their countrymen. This, in a nutshell, is the definition of “chain migration.”
What’s particularly vexing is the U.S. government is funneling taxpayer money to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who help resettle these immigrants and assist them in applying for welfare in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, and housing.
Coming from a country where the hourly wage is around 60 cents, any Haitian would be ecstatic about working in Ohio and earning a minimum wage of $10.45 an hour. Sadly, American workers can’t compete for the jobs they’re taking at those wages or survive at the resulting lower standards of living.
Samuel Gompers, father of the American labor movement and founder of what’s known today as the AFL-CIO Union understood all too well the conundrum of a “rapidly revolving labor supply at low wages to a regular supply of American wage earners at fair wages.” Companies like McGregor’s are thriving on “labor supply at low wages,” knowing full well the Haitians they’ve hired won’t ever complain about their pay nor attempt to unionize.
Let’s be clear about what’s going on here: Corporations are maximizing their profits while the government is socializing the costs at the taxpayers’ expense.
But low wages aren’t the only threat to Springfield. The large number of immigrants descending upon it are tearing apart the social fabric of a community that had already been brought to its knees, decades ago. Former Ohio State Representative Kyle Koehler has posted about a Springfield landlord with 63 properties who is now renting “cots” at $250 per head and placing 20 to 25 people in a dwelling. This is mass migration making housing unaffordable.
Springfield’s Mayor Rob Rue, who’d been cautiously optimistic about the arrival of Haitians, is now gob smacked at the strain they’re placing on the town: “The infrastructure of the city—our safety forces, our hospitals, our schools—Springfield is a close community and has a big heart, but at the same point, we’ve had this influx that has taxed all these services,” he said.
The U.S. can’t keep helping the citizens of other nations when it’s struggling to support its own. Our government is subsidizing and replacing our workforce with foreigners willing to work for less. And while corporations may be prospering, Americans are suffering from despair and dying.
Kevin Lynn is the founder of U.S. Tech Workers. Lynn writes about the role that the nonimmigrant employment visa system has on skilled white-collar workers. He is based in Pennsylvania. Contact him at klynn @ ifspp dot org.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.