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Jarrett Stepman | The Daily Signal
A small city in western Ohio has become a focal point of discussions about the mass immigration policies of the Biden-Harris administration.
At Tuesday night’s presidential debate on ABC, former President Donald Trump mentioned how the city of Springfield, Ohio, was being overrun by Haitian migrants and that people have reported their dogs, cats, ducks, geese, and all kinds of other animals being eaten by the new arrivals.
“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump claimed.
The line about the dogs was widely ridiculed as an absurd exaggeration, but there’s no question that Springfield is in turmoil due to the massive surge in Haitian migrants, estimated at 20,000 in a city with a population of about 58,000.
The Biden administration has granted “temporary protected status” to hundreds of thousands of Haitians, and there will likely be many more people coming from that troubled Caribbean island nation.
Vice President Kamala Harris seems to be enthusiastic about the temporary status program for Haitians, too.
That policy is part of this administration’s larger, general policy of just letting people from all over the world flood into the United States—legal or not, beneficial to the U.S. or not.
The temporary protected status for Haitians has been renewed to extend into 2026, so many more will likely come to America and to Springfield.
The border and immigration catastrophe often gets the most attention in big, blue sanctuary cities like New York. But this issue is hitting countless smaller towns and cities at the border and around the country that never chose to be sanctuary cities, but nevertheless are forced to deal with the Biden-Harris administration’s policies.
The burden for inundated smaller cities is often far worse. The arrival of tens of thousands of people can be transformative in a way it wouldn’t be in a city of millions. It’s awfully hard to assimilate a population of new arrivals whose numbers may soon rival the number of native residents.
And at the end of the day, why is it that these small towns—or really any American city—must bear the burden of another nation’s failure to create a livable place for their citizens?
Haiti has been in a state of crisis since its president was assassinated in 2021, but its problems extend back for centuries. Violent gangs have taken control of large parts of the country and its government teeters on the edge of oblivion. It has consistently rated as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is quite stable and functional by comparison.
This isn’t a new situation for Haiti, once called the “Pearl of the Caribbean.” A violent, lawless founding launched in 1791—more like the bloody and vicious French Revolution than the American Revolution—set the country on a course to becoming a long-term basket case.
Haiti famously threw off the shackles of slavery, but it never sustained the conditions to create a truly free, prosperous society. It’s a tragic story.
Many on the Left, and certainly many of Haiti’s politicians, blame Haiti’s problems on European colonization and the legacy of slavery. They demand reparations. Yet, it’s been given tens of billions of dollars in aid over the course of half a century and conditions have hardly improved. The problem isn’t just one bad regime; it’s been caused by systemic failure to create good governance.
From 2011 to 2021, the U.S. alone gave the country $13 billion. We’ve been shoveling money to the island nation for more than half a century. The Clinton Foundation has been busily making a bigger mess of things there, too. What are we getting in return for this massive public investment? What we are getting is an endless set of bills and now importation of Haiti’s problems.
The “solution” of the Biden-Harris administration is apparently to let them mass migrate to the U.S.
For little Springfield, Ohio, the city’s resources have been taxed to the limit, housing prices have skyrocketed, housing availability has crashed, and many of the residents are deeply troubled by the changes they see around them.
In the days before the Trump-Harris presidential debate on Tuesday night, videos from the Springfield City Commission meetings emerged showing residents livid about the changes they’ve seen occurring around them.
Here’s one Springfield resident saying at a commission meeting that he’s tired of seeing the Haitian migrants “grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them.”
Here is a woman explaining how her town is being “invaded,” and transformed. She says at a commission meeting that the migrants have been “stealing animals from farmers and leaving their severed heads at the site of an old school where children play.” She listed other disturbing behaviors, too.
Here’s a woman saying at a hearing that she has men who don’t speak English “screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard.” She further says that the danger is making it difficult to remain in Springfield.
Here’s yet another woman explaining how Haitian migrants are behaving badly in grocery stores and how city services are stressed to the breaking point.
Worst of all is the testimony of a woman who said her mother-in-law was killed by a Haitian migrant who was driving recklessly. As she rightly said, this is a far bigger problem than what’s possibly happening to dogs and cats.
Some local authorities are saying that they haven’t had significant reports of animal cruelty, but are we really supposed to discount the testimony from all these people saying otherwise?
You won’t be surprised to learn that most corporate media outlets are uninterested in covering this story except to repeat the “no problems here” mantra from local bureaucrats. With scant investigation, they insist that cats, dogs, and ducks aren’t being roasted in the parks; it’s all fake news.
The insinuation is that you should assume this is all just rube-ish American bigotry and nothing more.
But it’s quite disturbing that most media outlets are dedicated to just reporting what government agencies tell them.
Were some online memes and videos about Haitians devouring cats inaccurate? It looks like it. But it’s hard to discount what locals in Springfield are saying about their problems and what the numbers show.
The strain on local resources is real, and there is no question that the recent Haitian arrivals bring some drastically different cultural assumptions with them.
The issue has obviously become large enough that it’s caused significant turmoil in Springfield. Why are distressed locals simply being dismissed?
Whatever one can say about Trump’s comment about people eating dogs, at least it’s finally provoking a response. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, announced Wednesday that he is sending in state troopers and financial aid to help beleaguered Springfield.
That’s a better response than dismissal. But this issue can only be resolved by a federal government willing to put the interests of our citizens and communities first instead of just joining with the media and telling residents they are imagining their problems and should just shut up about it.
SOURCE: THE DAILY SIGNAL
