The Campaign Against Immigrants Isn’t About Protecting Springfield. By Adam Serwer

by Adam Serwer / Sep 18, 2024 at 10:32 PM//keep unread//hide

Six days into terrorizing the city of Springfield, Ohio, with baseless nonsense about Haitian immigrants kidnapping and eating people’s pets, the Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance admitted that the tales were intended to push a certain narrative.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told CNN on Sunday. Days earlier, Vance had acknowledged that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false”—a confession that implies that he does not care whether they are true.

Since former President Donald Trump and Vance began centering their campaign on lies about Haitian immigrants being “dumped” on Springfield, municipal buildings, schools, and local festivals have had to be evacuated or canceled because of bomb threats. Asked whether he condemned the threats against Haitian immigrants, Trump couldn’t even bring himself to say that the threats were wrong, and instead simply spread misinformation about the migrants again: “I don’t know what happened with the bomb threats. I know that it’s been taken over by illegal migrants, and that’s a terrible thing that happened.” Besides failing to offer even a shred of concern for residents menaced by bomb threats, the statement was also false: The Haitians in Springfield are living and working there legally using green cards, humanitarian parole, and Temporary Protected Status, a legal immigration status for people who cannot return safely to their country of origin. Trump has vowed to deport them anyway.

The reward that the Haitian community in Springfield has received for doing exactly what Republicans demand of legal immigrants—work, provide for themselves, contribute to their community—is a campaign of slander and intimidation. Contrary to Vance’s insistence that he is creating “stories” about a community to alleviate the suffering of Ohioans, what the Trump campaign is actually doing is invoking that suffering as license to justify violence and harm. This is the most employed rhetorical device of the Trump campaign: point to someone’s suffering and then offer as a solution the application of state violence against a disfavored group, using Americans’ problems as a pretext to harm people they have chosen to hate.

Trump and Vance have said that the Haitians were “dumped” on Springfield, that they came illegally, that they’ve spread disease, that they’re eating people’s pets. These are all long-standing staples of anti-immigrant rhetoric regardless of the origin of the immigrants, attempts to use shocking, disgust-provoking anecdotes to overcome people’s ability to reason. Vance has now essentially admitted that he is weaving “stories” for a larger purpose, but it’s worth examining these allegations a little more closely to see what that purpose is.

“What we know is that the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move, and Springfield has really made a great resurgence with a lot of companies coming in,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, told ABC News this past weekend. “These Haitians came in to work for these companies. What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers. They’re very happy to have them there. And frankly, that’s helped the economy.”

There are a few things about DeWine’s comments that are worth noting. One is that the Haitian migrants came to work and have benefited the town’s economy; they were not “dumped” there. The Haitians’ arrival did not hurt Springfield; it helped revitalize the kind of town that Trump and Vance claim to want to help. The Republican ticket’s allegations about disease and pet-eating appear to be completely spurious—the author of the Facebook post from which those stories originated has publicly apologized for spreading them and acknowledged that they have no evidence to support them. As my colleague David Graham notes, the arrival of the Haitian workers helped spur an economic revival, exactly what Vance has said he wants for his home state of Ohio.

There are only two grains of truth in Vance’s complaints about the Haitian migrants. One is that last year, a local boy, Aiden Clark, was killed when a Haitian driver hit Clark’s school bus by accident—though Vance has falsely called his death an act of “murder.” Aiden’s father, Nathan Clark, has condemned “morally bankrupt” politicians and “hatred spewing people” for trying to exploit his son’s death to foment racism against Haitians. Another is that the influx of workers has strained local resources: The New York Times reported earlier this year that the new arrivals have put pressure on housing, medical facilities, and schools. Of course, this is how economic development works; people arrive, drawn by promises of gainful employment, and then services are expanded to meet demand. Those services in turn provide more jobs and opportunities, in a virtuous cycle.

To the extent that the arrival of the Haitian workers who have helped revive Springfield’s economic fortunes has caused problems, those problems have obvious solutions—investment in housing, schools, infrastructure, and so on—that would benefit everyone else in Springfield. Deporting the workers, in contrast, would harm the town, reverse its economic revival, and tear apart the community. And the town’s leadership is not asking for them to be deported. Springfield’s Republican Mayor Rob Rue called the threats a “hateful response to immigration in our town.” He has been subjected to death threats for defending the Haitian community.  

So the question is, why are Trump and Vance so fixated on deporting the Haitians?

One reason is Trump has a particular, well-documented hatred toward Haitians. The former president infamously referred to Haiti as one of the “shithole countries” that the United States should reject immigrants from, in favor of those from countries “like Norway.” Trump had also previously complained that Haitians “all have AIDS.” Trump’s hostility to Haitians extends to other Black immigrants—he also reportedly complained that if Nigerian immigrants were allowed to stay, they would “never go back to their huts.” Nigerian Americans are the most highly educated immigrant subgroup in America, and Haitians, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier has documented, have a higher rate of employment than native-born Americans and are much more likely than other immigrants or native-born Americans to join the U.S. military. Trump apologists have repeatedly insisted that Trump simply wants immigrants who can contribute to American society, but Trump himself ignores Black immigrants’ contributions in favor of his own ingrained stereotypes about Black people.

Another reason is Trump and Vance appear not to be interested in helping anyone in Springfield, or anywhere else for that matter. Their actions point to a political theory of the election, which is that fearmongering about immigrants, especially Black immigrants, will scare white people into voting for Trump. They also point to an ideological theory of the nation, which is that America belongs to white people, and that the country would be better if it were poorer and weaker, as long as it were also whiter. Trump and Vance have a specific policy agenda for socially engineering the nation through state force to be whiter than it is now: mass deportation, repealing birthright citizenship, and denaturalization of American citizens. This agenda, in addition to being immoral, would wreck the American economy. Republican elected officials in Ohio are defending the Haitians in Springfield because they understand that removing them would have a terrible effect on their town and state—the same terrible effect that Trump’s agenda would have on the country.

Trump’s and Vance’s statements reveal a belief that it would be better to leave dying towns in the Midwest to wither away than revive them and have to share that prosperity with people who are Black, and they seem to be betting that enough American voters in enough swing states agree that it would be better to be broke than integrated. In exchange for these fearful votes, a second Trump administration would proceed to shower tax cuts on the wealthy, raise them on everyone else, slash regulations on big business, and further undermine unions, while towns like Springfield would be left to tumble further into decline.

That message, spoken plainly, is not as appealing as they wish it were. So to justify hatred toward the Haitian migrants, Trump and Vance chose to smear them as pet-eating savages. Saying “we will invest more in these communities to ensure that they continue to prosper” would not have been good enough. It would not have removed what Trump and Vance see as the actual problem, which is not poverty, addiction, lack of affordable housing, or job loss, but the mere presence of Haitians on American soil.