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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio—Outside of Springfield’s city center, you’ll see the quiet heartland of America. Undulating farmlands where corn and soybeans dry, awaiting harvest. Its fields of corn, grain silos, and farmhouses, spread out in the distance, are reminiscent of scenes of Haitian provinces.
Closer to downtown, in residential areas, 2- and 3-story one-family houses line the tree-shaded streets. People wave from their porches. Peewee football tailgates are loud and packed, and not uncommon on Sundays. Shoppers come and go from the market near the field. A woman selling bottled liqueurs from the back of her open car trunk asks in Creole, “Kremas pou ou?”
It’s hard to imagine this convivial setting to be a flash point for immigration. Yet, it is. The result of several factors: insufficient federal and state funds, local budgets pushed to a breaking point, businesses encouraged to find additional energetic workers. And, perhaps triggered by the first three, divisive political rhetoric that rejects the positive economics of immigration.
David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a Libertarian public policy research organization, has been following the movement of immigrants, including Haitians. In a U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee session earlier this year, Bier referred to his report, “The Cost of the Border Crisis.”
He summed it up by tweeting after the session, “Immigrants are makers not takers.”
“The government could do much more to facilitate faster and fuller assimilation of Haitians in the United States,” Bier wrote in 2021, back when the Del Rio encampment of Haitians grabbed headlines.
Other factors have shaped Springfield’s conditions, particularly employers, who benefit from cheaper labor but are rarely held accountable.
“It is very invested in having access to a low-wage worker pool, and they actively recruit from countries, from communities,” Reanne Frank, an Ohio State University professor of sociology, said. “It happened in Springfield. They are actively recruiting Haitian immigrants.”
Families of immigrants throughout the U.S. including in Springfield, many of whom are still finding their own footholds, contribute significantly to the newly arrived. And finally, local nonprofits, which often depend on non-immediate grants and gifts, provide support.
There remains a financial gap. The question is, who can and should fill it? Or who in government can take the political risk of doing so?
Despite extreme challenges, Haitians integrate well into the U.S. economy and society, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute wrote in, “Haitians Assimilate Well in the United States.” Across numerous economic and social measures, Haitians and their U.S. descendants contribute to and prosper in their new country. For example:
Source: Cato.org
Ohio and Congress held up funds
Three weeks after making national headlines, talk of how the town might have avoided becoming a flashpoint abounds. Based on past reports and interviews, one supposition is that federal and state governments could have supported the city financially, more and sooner.
Senator Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, criticized the Biden administration Sept. 16, saying it should have had a plan in place to support communities like Springfield.
The federal government did provide some additional funding earlier this year to larger cities like New York after complaints from its mayor. President Joe Biden, who is blamed by Republicans for “immigrants flooding the borders,” has said repeatedly Congress had agreed on a bipartisan solution that Donald Trump torpedoed.
During Springfield’s annual budgeting process in June, Assistant Mayor David Estrop was among those clamoring for funds. Although the state increased the Local Government Fund to 1.7 percent from 1.6 percent, additional tax cuts at the state level were projected to decrease the amount of money available for local municipalities.
“The state of Ohio balances its budget on the backs of local government, in part, as well as schools,” Estrop told the Springfield News-Sun at the time.
Ohio’s Local Government fund, which provides cities with unrestricted funds, has been decreasing since around 2010, according to Steve Patterson, Mayor of Athens, Ohio, a city of 20,000.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, however, dedicated $2.5 million from the Ohio Department of Health to support the Springfield area’s Haitian clients, translation and healthcare services and vaccinations for Haitians on Sept. 11. Last Thursday, he unveiled a new mobile health clinic for the town.
The city is not currently responding to questions about its finances, but outside observers are encouraged by the funding.
“I am proud that the governor has allocated, hopefully, not just one-time assistance to [Springfield],” Patterson said.
The recovery will take time, and Patterson hopes Springfield can manage its ongoing financial challenges, which are expected to persist into next year.
“An influx of people is difficult, regardless of the source,” said Jennifer Lyle, mayor of New Concord, an Ohio village of 2,300 less than 100 miles from Springfield. “It’s really hard to manage.”
Every fall, for example, students of Muskingum University descend on the village, adding an additional 1300 plus people to the local population. The village government has become accustomed to the influx, Lyle said, and budgets appropriately for changes in revenue.
Local employers and neighboring cities may help
Ohio State University Professor Reanne Frank, whose research focuses on how demographics are influenced by migration and inequality, blamed the local employer class of Springfield.
“They privatize the benefits of immigrants by taking their low-wage labor, which benefits their companies and their profit margins,” Frank said. “And they make public the social cost without any kind of acknowledgment that they need to make a buffer for the short term.”
Not everyone agrees with the idea, however.
“I would flip that narrative,” said Patterson. “It’s the employer who created the job opportunity, and that job opportunity is creating an increase in [a city’s] tax base that is helping the community. That money is going mostly to our general funds — what is used to pay the salaries for your firefighters or your police department or your code enforcement office.”
As revenue goes up, those funds could help with additional hires within those departments and eventually offload some pressures placed on impacted departments, Patterson said.
Still, there remains the budget gap, which needs to be covered immediately, that large population influxes bring.
Patterson was in Springfield a week ago with a bi-partisan group of mayors from Columbus, Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton and others as well as Former Ohio Governor Bob Taft.
“This meeting was one of those moments where we were not just saying, ‘Hey, we’re here to support you’ but we were strategic in what we could do to help,” Patterson, a former health psychologist, said. “We had several deliverables, one of which was to establish an agreement that we can send services [to one another’s cities] that would be helpful — providing police officers or firefighters or EMS.”
The group of eight made the agreement, knowing full well the abrupt change that took place in Springfield could have happened or might happen in the future, to any one of their own cities.
“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re more and more isolated, and not seeing an effective way out, as opposed to having just colleagues lean in and go, ‘We’re here,’” said Patterson.
Staffing firms, intermediaries play critical roleDespite the pitfalls, immigrants and the economy continue to chug along in a symbiotic dance.
Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley, a major Wall Street investment firm, found the surge of more than 3 million immigrants to the U.S. in 2022 and 2023 has helped drive higher GDP growth. It helped stabilize housing prices, lower wage costs and reduce inflation. In short, the U.S. was on a growth path because of immigration.
“Over the medium term, it is positive for the economy,” Morgan Stanley’s Global Chief Economist Ellen Zentner told Bloomberg in an interview last March. “For a politician, it’s difficult to point to immigration as being such a positive for the economy because it is also a political issue.”
Frank said the skill composition of the foreign-born population, which reached almost 14 percent in 2022, is much more diverse than it was in prior migration waves. and contributed to new enclaves rising across the U.S.
In many cases, staffing companies and personal contacts accelerated the fluctuation of a city’s population by successfully marketing jobs to immigrants and helping them reach out-of-the-way towns. In the worst scenarios, immigrants may end up in substandard living accommodations or unsafe or poor employment opportunities.
At one end are legitimate companies like Jaspen Consulting, a staffing firm in Indianapolis. As of 2023, it had helped Haitians secure nearly 4,000 jobs around the state, The Haitian Times reported. Jaspen charged a fee, which they declined to share, to the hiring companies to ensure quality housing, food and support was provided to the employee workforce.
At the other end are unregulated intermediaries who give little to the impact. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sep. 23 that a Haitian middle man helped Haitians move to Denver, Co. for jobs with meatpacking giant, JBS. The man, who worked for himself, charged immigrants directly for substandard living conditions. He is now under investigation.
Somewhere in between are certain companies and individuals said to be under investigation for allegedly duping migrants into moving to places like Springfield. The Haitian Times has not been able to independently verify those claims.
“There’s a stickiness to where immigrants end up settling,” Frank said. “If you know somebody who went to Springfield and got a good job, and then you hear about that job and labor recruiters are saying, ‘come and bring your relatives and friends.’ You’ll consider Springfield as a place to settle.”
Still, all the narratives about immigrants — real, imagined and somewhere in between — consistently fuel diverging political views that overshadow the economic benefits.
Bier, a staunch supporter of legal immigration, offered a blunt assessment.
“The idea that immigration, on net, benefits Democrats is just refuted by history,” Bier said. “Republicans have only ever done good when the immigrant population in the United States has been above 10 percent.”
The post Beyond the media circus, Part 2: Where federal government leaves void, others step in appeared first on The Haitian Times.
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