DAVID MARCUS: Cats and dogs aside, Biden-Harris unleashed disaster on Springfield
Columnist David Marcus goes to Springfield, Ohio, where residents are fed up with the way the government has managed a massive refugee influx.
There is an old saying in the journalism business that goes, "if it bleeds, it leads," which means that once violence occurs a story gets much hotter. We can now add "if it mews, it is news," to the list of Fourth Estate expressions.
I should tell you right at the top here that I am not going to solve the Mystery Of The Missing Pets. Frankly, at this point Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot could team up and the details would still be dicey. And anyway, it is not really the point.
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Whatever the scale of the threat to our furry friends is, this salacious story has rightfully focused the nation’s eyes on Springfield’s otherwise ignored migrant and economic woes wrought by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
"When I was young, there was a bar on every corner, we’d hear music at one place, another would be a disco," Teri, a lifetime resident in her 60s who works at the only hotel in downtown Springfield told me. "Today, it’s completely different."
There is a certain type of town and city, not unique to the Midwest, but common there, which boasts an almost ghostly grand old architecture that mocks its quiet decline of cracked windows and empty storefronts. Springfield is almost the Platonic ideal of such a place.
Under the Biden and Harris program of unchecked borders and almost limitless refugees, this new influx of mostly Haitian migrants is crushing any hope of revival.
Vickie, who is retired and lives just outside of town, also regaled me with tales of the Springfield that was: trips to Woolworth with her grandmother and bustling markets. She is passionate about restoring some luster to downtown.
Part of that effort is a Saturday Farmers Market which was lovely, if sparsely attended, but where there was absolutely no sign of the refugees integrated into the broader community. The same next door, at a new food hall meant to be a community gathering place.
I asked her if she thought that the government had done enough to prepare the town for an influx of as many as 20,000 Haitian migrants, and if strong support systems were in place. She smiled, and said, "No, not at all."
The reason I asked was that just over a month ago I was in Harrisonburg, Va., which is an official federal refugee city and in the past decades has taken in its own tens of thousands. As I wrote at the time, it is remarkable how people there, on both sides, take pride in how well managed the program is, and how well it helps to assimilate the newcomers.
There are English classes, work training, and transitional housing, but according to Vickie, much of this is sorely lacking in Springfield and inventing these programs on the fly is draining resources and making life harder.
"I was at the DMV," she told me. "It took forever, customers were speaking seven languages and nobody at the desk could translate."
That isn’t as sexy as barbecued pets, but it is just one of the many hassles that this diabolically mismanaged refugee plan has created, and many residents clearly feel overwhelmed by it.
Another staggering difference between Harrisonburg’s success and Springfield’s disaster is that in the former, over a period of decades about 150 to 200 refugees were arriving a year. That can be managed and planned for. In Springfield, it’s thousands per year, and has turned the situation into an absolute emergency.
About the only people who seem happy with the situation are a handful of factory owners and the city government. In a viral clip from CBS News this week, one such employer said, "Our Haitian associates come to work every day, they don’t have a drug problem, they’ll stay at their machine…they are here to work."
This sounds pretty darned similar to Clark County Health Commissioner Chris Cook, who told the Dayton Daily News back in October 2023 that employers "love it that they show up for work every day, can pass a drug screen, and are willing to work overtime and work hard.
Residents are far less convinced by this canned talking point.
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Nobody I spoke with expressed any animosity towards the migrants themselves. As Yolanda, a black woman in her 30s who drives for Uber put it, "It’s not their fault, they were told to come here, but the government needs to do more, a lot more."
Sadly, Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have no interest in these pleas. She let them in, but now they are the problem of the good people of Springfield. She and Biden, or whoever is running the country, have no plan.
So, with fools to the left of them saying their justified anger is racist, and jokers on the right blasting cat memes online, the people of Springfield are stuck in the middle, and many feel they are being made fun of.
I talked it over with one guy in his 20s who has been in town working on crane maintenance, but lives in Minneapolis which has similar migrant issues. He summed it up about as well as possible, saying that immigrants need to be taught to "tend the garden in a way that yields to the American way of life."
In Springfield, as in so many places across our nation, that is not happening, and both native-born Americans and the migrants are paying a very steep price.
