SPRINGFIELD—The strain of migrants to an Ohio city is reaching a breaking point. Springfield, Ohio, a city of under 60,000, has seen a flood of 20,000 migrants from Haiti over the past four years.
Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck wrote a letter this week calling on Senators Sherrod Brown and Tim Scott to address the crisis.
The Story
Springfield has become a public face of the U.S. illegal immigration crisis and the Biden Administration’s open border policy. The city of 60,000 has swollen with nearly 20,000 migrants from Haiti over the past four years.
Both legal and illegal immigrants pose $12.5 trillion in net fiscal costs to taxpayers. The strains on housing, city services, and the challenge of educating thousands of additional children, whose first language is not English, and whose education represents their home countries’, have nearly brought Springfield and cities like it, to the breaking point.
Tragically, the cost to Springfield also came at the cost of the life of a child. Last year an illegal immigrant from Haiti, Hermanio Joseph, hit a school bus with his Honda Odyssey minivan, injuring dozens and killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark.
Has Springfield Been Forgotten?
Clark’s death at Joseph’s hands made headlines, but no Ohio media published Joseph's immigration status. As Springfield citizens count the costs, and their city’s future, the crisis can no longer be swept under the rug.
Springfield has suffered under the strain of migrants, but also taken its knocks with manufacturing jobs going overseas and the opioid epidemic.
Home to gorgeous Victorian homes, beautiful churches, and a Lutheran college, Springfield was once a significant manufacturing center before trade policy eviscerated its downtown. Today, Springfield’s poverty rate is nearly double the national average.
Over the past four years, the tide of 15,000 to 20,000 Haitian immigrants pouring in have added to the strains of trade policies and the opioid epidemic.
City Manager Bryan Heck penned a letter to Senators Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) asking for the federal government to step in, writing that the city is “set up to fail.”
Read the Full Letter Here
Looking ahead:
Whether the city can keep pace with the tide of immigrants, and how residents can deal with the strains on city services, and unprecedented challenges in their children’s school classrooms, remains to be seen. Immigration is poised to be the make or break issue in 2024 elections, with representatives unwilling or unable to check the Biden Administration’s open border policy.
Meanwhile, mass deportations of illegal immigrants have shown overwhelming favorability with voters in recent polling. Nearly half of democrats, a third of Gen Z voters, and seven in ten Republicans favor the measures.
