The city of Springfield, Ohio, located in the southwestern part of the state, in 2020 had a population of 58,662. No one knows what its population is today, because in the ensuing years, at least 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled there, taking advantage of our open borders and a grant by Homeland Security of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian nationals. Springfield Mayor Rob Rue spoke of the huge increase at a recent meeting of the Springfield City Commission.
“Springfield is now saturated,”
Rue told the Commission.
The kind of sudden increase in foreign population that Springfield is experiencing does not happen by accident. To investigate the crisis, in 2023 the city created the Immigrant Accountability Response Team. The Team, which comprises a group of city staff members, and has investigated three different immigrant-related areas: immigrant employment, housing, and driver instruction. It also consults with state and federal investigative agencies regarding those issues.
In revealing some of the Team’s findings so far, and without naming names, Mayor Rue said at the Commission meeting that “there were companies that knew they were going to make an effort to bring in individuals who were crossing the border.” The city, he said, knew nothing of those plans. Rue continued:
I’m upset at the fact we didn’t get a chance to have an infrastructure in place if there were going to be 20,000 more people from 2020 to 2025. [We would have hired] 25 more police officers and 25 firefighters . . . along with making sure individuals already living here and faithfully paying rent would not be displaced because of the greed of landlords. We would have been ahead of that or tried to combat it … we did not get to do that.”
Rue was referring to one of the major impacts his city has suffered from the dramatic increase in its population: a pronounced housing shortage. The sudden demand for housing has driven rent sky high and caused many longtime residents to be forced out of homes they had lived in for years. To discuss that particular issue, he and city manager Bryan Heck joined Fox & Friends First on Friday, July 12. Mr. Heck told the interviewer:
We had a housing shortage well before this immigration crisis has impacted our community. And this has just made it a hundred times worse. It’s setting communities like Springfield up to fail. We do not have the capacity to sustain it.
But, Ohio is a red state and as such gets little attention from the Biden government.
For more, see Fox News and the Springfield News Sun.