For decades, politicians from both parties United States Immigration Virtually all say it is bankrupt: National sentiment and partisan rancor have reached new heights over the past two years as attempts at comprehensive reform have failed and cities and towns have struggled to accommodate immigrants.
With emotions running high, Republican-led states Busing migrants to Democrat-led cities. Presidential Election Now, attention has shifted to cities where the newest residents are legally in the country.
Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate Ohio Senator J.D. Vance Jumped on Disproven rumours Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are reportedly eating family pets.
In short, immigrants come and stay in this country through a variety of methods and programs that are not easily captured or acknowledged in political rhetoric, but fear-mongering about immigrants is as old as the country itself.
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The roughly 15,000 Haitians who live in Springfield are in the U.S. legally. Most are under temporary protected status, which allows them to stay and work. Trump and Vance have failed to make that distinction, and many critics say it is a “misconduct” that has led to a lack of transparency. Trump’s long history of attacks on black peopleAt a rally in Las Vegas last weekend, the Republican presidential candidate said the city is being “taken over by illegal immigrants.”
Trump is legal Deport Haitians People in protected status.
Among his supporters Vivek Ramaswami The federal government falsely reported that it transported Haitians to Springfield’s doorstep, when in reality, immigrants with legal status or those granted asylum must pay for their own transportation. Springfield’s Haitian population grew primarily as immigrants moving to where they could find family, housing, and jobs.
Benefits of immigration
Historically, immigrants and people with temporary protected status came to the United States to work, often taking jobs that Americans refused, filling labor shortages as older people retired and birth rates declined. And immigration has shaped the cultural, economic and religious identities of many American cities.
“It’s always kind of funny that this is questioned because most Americans are fundamentally immigrants. There’s this idea that immigration is not a strength,” said Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican.
Holt said one in five Oklahoma City residents are Latino, and their restaurants and small businesses are an integral part of the city of about 700,000. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Vietnamese immigrants flocked to the city, and today their community, a few miles west of the state capitol, is known for its bustling markets and many restaurants.
“Their culture and food is now a big part of what makes Oklahoma City unique,” Holt said.
Following the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Mayor Holt welcomed more than 2,000 Afghan refugees to the city, one of whom, Feroz Bashari, was sworn in for Mayor Holt’s second term.
Bashari served as spokesman for the Afghan government before the US withdrawal and fled with his family when the government was toppled.
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“My friends who came before me said it was a good place to live and raise children,” Bashari said. “It’s a conservative place, people believe in God and are very religious. It’s almost the same as our religious culture.”
By setting up businesses and paying taxes, immigrants can revitalize sparsely populated neighborhoods and dilapidated streets — Miami’s Little Havana, San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Chicago’s Polish Triangle are popular tourist hotspots — but they also change the fabric and culture of cities and countries in ways that are difficult for long-time residents to achieve.
The Complexity of Immigration
Ohio’s foreign-born population includes 5,442 people of Haitian origin, according to the census taken from July 2022 to July 2023. By comparison, Florida and New York have Haitian-born populations of more than 370,000 and 119,000, respectively.
Springfield officials estimate the current figure at between 15,000 and 20,000, and say the sheer size of the influx, combined with language barriers, has caused delays in obtaining routine government services like health care, accessing social services, and obtaining licenses. The town has also seen an increase in traffic accidents involving deaths and injuries, increasing pressure on its housing stock.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has deep ties to Haiti, having visited the country more than 20 times with his wife to support a tuition-free school named for his late daughter. DeWine, a Springfield native and lifelong area resident, said the Haitians who have landed in the city are hard-working and are helping to alleviate labor shortages in factories and warehouses.
But the sudden influx of Haitians into the city of 58,000 is also straining city resources, he said. Some of those frustrations came to a head at a Springfield City Council meeting last week.
A school bus driver said he and other bus drivers are forced to take evasive action every day to “avoid people who can’t drive.” One man told the story of a friend whose landlord evicted him from his home and tripled his rent. Other residents complained about overcrowding in schools and increasing homelessness among longtime residents.
“They should put up a fully booked sign right now,” one man said.
“Certainly there are challenges,” Governor DeWine said at a press conference this week.
“But we are going to rise to these challenges,” he said. “It may not be an overnight solution, but we are going to address these challenges and these problems.”
Earlier this month, Mayor DeWine announced the city would be given $2.5 million over the next two years to meet health care funding requests.
A long history of fear of immigrants
Trump has alleged that immigrants have caused soaring crime rates in Colorado cities like Springfield and Aurora, but officials in those cities deny that, and many studies have shown that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born residents.
Nearly 200 years before Trump and Vance spread the unfounded scare tale of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, kidnapping and eating dogs and cats, Chinese laborers in California were similarly demonized. In the 1850s, many Chinese men migrated from the West, first to mine for gold and then to build the transcontinental railroad. Propaganda at the time stoked fears that Chinese people smoked opium and ate strange foods, a “yellow peril” hypothesis. This sentiment led Congress to pass the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first law restricting immigration based on ethnicity.
In 1924, the United States enacted comprehensive immigration legislation with quotas based on country of origin that gave heavy preference to immigrants from Northern and Western Europe. Its purpose was to limit immigration from Asia and to limit Jewish and other immigrants fleeing Europe.
A major change came with the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act in 1965. The act abolished immigration quotas and aimed to help immigrants bring their families to the U.S. This practice, known as chain migration, first benefited Europeans and now helps people from Asia and Latin America.
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This story has been updated to remove an incorrect statement that Ramaswamy’s town hall meeting was sponsored by the Trump campaign.
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Graham Lee Brewer in Oklahoma City and Terry Tan in Phoenix are members of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Associated Press writers Mike Schneider in Orlando, Florida, and Michael Rubinkam in northeastern Pennsylvania contributed to this report.
