For Release Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024

In what ranks as one of the most memorable debate moments in recent history, Donald Trump said that Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets in Springfield, Ohio.

No one has yet turned up evidence that this is true, although there is an audio recording of a man reporting that he witnessed four Haitian immigrants absconding with geese from a local pond.

Since everyone is always happy to see geese go someplace else, this call hasn't made much of an impression on the debate over Trump's comments, which, true to form, were the most incendiary thing he could say about Springfield.

Even if Tabby and Fido aren't on the menu in the small Ohio town, the fact remains that a place with a population of 60,000 has seen an influx of 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants since 2020, making the new arrivals a wildly disproportionate share of the population in short order.

Prior to this point, Springfield had nothing to do with Haiti, and looking at the map, a town located between Columbus and Dayton would be one of the least likely places to have anything to do with Haiti. It is very far from Little Haiti in Miami, and it had no pre-existing Haitian population or an infrastructure to provide services to Haitian Creole speakers.

No matter. Under the Biden administration's open-handed immigration policies, every place in the country has become subject to sudden, disruptive demographic change. We've seen it in big cities, where Democratic mayors have complained of the associated burdens, and now we are seeing it in a small city.

To match in relative terms what's happened in Springfield, more than 2 million migrants would have had to arrive in New York City the past several years.

Numbers matter. No one would care if there were 150 new Haitian migrants in Springfield since 2020, or 1,500. But 15,000 is a different proposition. Quantity, as they say, has a quality all of its own.

To be clear, Haitian immigrants (many permitted here legally under Biden policy) didn't begin showing up in Springfield hoping to filch unsuspecting domestic short hairs. Rather, they were looking for work in a city that was seeing something of an economic revival. That's all well and good, but people are more than cogs to be plugged into warehouses or manufacturing operations.

They come with families and with needs for housing, health care and education. They have pre-existing cultural predilections different from ours (Haiti and the United States are very different places), and if they don't speak the language, that makes everything even more difficult.

Nor are resources unlimited. Health care facilities, schools and the housing stock have all been strained in Springfield.

The New York Times reports that consultations began to take three times as long at the local community health center. The head of the clinic told the paper: "We lost productivity. We had huge burnout of staff." It hired six Haitian Creole speakers, and annual spending on translation services increased from $43,000 in 2020 to $436,000.

The school district, according to the Times, has had to hire two dozen new English-as-a-second-language instructors, and several interpreters.

The city manager, Bryan Heck, wrote a letter to U.S. senators saying that the influx is "putting a significant strain on our resources and ability to provide ample housing for all of our residents."

The Haitians also tend to be poor drivers. Ohio governor Mike DeWine has pledged help from the state highway patrol.

News reports often dismiss the concerns of residents as ill-informed or xenophobic. Their complaints about the costs and disorder associated with the wave of immigration are legitimate, though, and the sense that the town has undergone a large-scale change that no one was consulted about is very real. Who signed up to become a laboratory for Biden's experiment in permitting Haitians to come to and stay in the United States?

The cats and dogs may be safe and sound, but all is not right in Springfield.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)