I’ve been to Springfield several times. I’ve even had hookups there. Listen it sucks, but it sucks because it’s a small city in Ohio not because of the Haitians.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/20/opinion/springfield-haitian-migrants-ohio.html

The GOP Governor of Ohio wrote an NY Times op-ed talking about what a nice place Springfield is and how terrible it is that domestic terrorists have threatened the population.

He’s also going to vote for Trump

There’s an NYT podcast picking apart the origins of the pet comment and what the immigrant population details actually are. Summary.

Springfield: population 60,000 dying town, no jobs. Suddenly manufacturing moves in, and now there’s not enough workers.

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In the last 3-4 yrs, very large influx of Haitian immigrants: 12,000 to 20,000. Immigrants tend to go where the community is in a new country, so the density in one place makes sense.

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On the one hand the new jobs that moved in now under threat of moving out due to lack of workers have stayed. On the other hand, it’s too much population to support all at once. 4 guys in an apartment can pay more rent than 1 family and other more traditional setups so rent goes up for locals, and housing availability goes down.

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Healthcare is overwhelmed. I can say that her comment on the translation need, at these numbers, overwhelming healthcare business hours and emergency room wait times is plausibly 100% correct. Use of translators which are almost never in person but by 3 way phone (corded phone with two receivers), speaker capable corded phone at times, or video, depending, do make each case requiring one take 2-3x as long. Everything gets said twice and there are pauses between everything said. Equipment availability is also never every room level. Usually there’s only 1-2 tablets for video interpreters too. And the interpreter services don’t always have interpreters available for your language at various times throughout the day. It can be a bottleneck with just a few cases. Some patients are savvy enough to bring their smart phones in with a translation app, that can work in a pinch, but most medical institutions require a trained medical interpreter for medical conversations. Family interpretation can be unreliable for medicine. So at some point that phone needs to go away and an actual, trained medical interpreter needs to be present. For every case. Clinic appointments get run over, and those already take a long time to get into.

Translation aside, adding this many people in a small town/city would do it as well, even with common language.

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Small Midwest town is suddenly 1/4 Haitian, with spike on housing prices and loss of available housing, and healthcare is overwhelmed. Enter tragic headline. A mini van hits a school bus and a child dies. Yes, that mini van was driven by a Haitian immigrant. The reporter says this is the boil over point.

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Now, among other things, some resident seeds the pets thing on a local Facebook group.

He continued, “Does anybody really think? I challenge ya. Go to Springfield, Ohio, which has been overwhelmed by 20,000 Haitian immigrants. Go to any community that’s been overwhelmed by Kamala Harris’ illegal alien policies and tell me that these are stories made up by politicians.”

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