JosephZ
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- Mar 25, 2017
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So what begins to happen is that this town [Springfield], as it falls on hard times, you begin to see houses boarded up, buildings abandoned, downtown looking in sad shape. And that decline persisted for several decades, until a few years ago, when the city leadership and the Chamber of Commerce decided to do something about it. They came up with a plan to revitalize the city.
They started pitching this city as an attractive place to do business. The location of the city, smack dab between Dayton and Columbus, is a big plus. It’s easily accessible to two interstates. It has several colleges and institutions for training. And it’s an affordable place to live and to operate as a business. And this plan actually succeeds.
A major turning point was in 2017 when a very large Japanese auto parts maker acquired land in a decaying part of the city and set up shop, creating hundreds of jobs. And it was probably one of the biggest employers that ended up setting up shop there, but it wasn’t the only one.
Companies that make boxes for Happy Meals sold at McDonald’s.
Companies that distribute clothing across the country. But there was a problem. There weren’t enough workers.
Immigrants start to arrive, in particular Haitians. Like other immigrant groups, they hear about opportunities by word of mouth. They tell each other. In this case, they were drawn by the availability of well-paying jobs. And they also heard that the cost of living was pretty low in Springfield.
So soon, more and more Haitians arrived. And they were very attractive to employers because they had authorization to legally work in the United States. And what they have is something called temporary protected status.
Springfield benefits from this influx of Haitians. They have come to work. I heard from employers like Jamie McGregor, who runs an auto parts maker, that Haitians are coming to work on time. They’re reliable. They’re drama-free. And they’ve now come to represent 10 percent of his workforce.
The immigrants are working in a variety of capacities. Some of them are opening businesses and restaurants. They’re sending their kids to schools, schools that actually had been losing students because the city had been shrinking. And they’re leasing homes and apartments.
I met a landlord, in fact, who has been buying up some of these homes that had been delinquent on property taxes and went to auction and fixing them up to rent them to Haitians. And I took a spin around town with him. And I was able to see that there are many blocks where newly refurbished homes are sprucing up the neighborhood. They have manicured gardens, and they look a lot more cheerful than blocks where homes are still boarded up.
So you’re seeing, literally, a town come back to life very quickly, almost overnight.
The Story Behind ‘They’re Eating the Pets’
A false claim made by Donald Trump in the presidential debate has its origins in an Ohio town.
Refugees revitalize American cities
Lewiston, Maine had a population at its peak of about 80,000 in the ‘60s, early ‘70s. But then, like many of these towns in the Midwest, it began to lose population, in large part because so many manufacturing jobs went overseas. Companies that operated in town shuttered, and people had to look for opportunity elsewhere.
In 2001, Somali refugees from across the United States began arriving en masse, drawn by cheap rents and safe school opportunities. The mayor asked them to stop coming. “Our city is maxed out financially, physically, and emotionally,” he wrote in an open letter. At that time, similar to today, antirefugee rhetoric emboldened xenophobia. A white supremacist group came to Lewiston to protest what they considered an invasion.
But Somalis saw a chance to open businesses in a town that had declined since the 1970s with the loss of the mill industry. Restaurants and shops took root in the decaying town center that residents referred to as “the combat zone.” It’s taken hard work and cooperative spirit, but Somalis today are integrated, and some, like Zamzam Mohamud, whom the mayor appointed to the school board, have become icons of community engagement. Crime has gone down, according to the police chief. A few years after Somalis began arriving, Inc. magazine named Lewiston one of the best places to do business in America.
St Louis has one of the largest Bosnian refugee populations in the country, many of them Muslims. They began arriving two decades ago and rebuilt their lives and brought prosperity. A local bank took a chance early on, providing loans to buy houses, invest in properties, and open restaurants, bakeries, repair shops, trucking businesses, and cleaning companies. Bosnian entrepreneurship has created jobs and opportunities for other Americans as well. The population of some 70,000 is credited with bolstering sagging school enrollment, invigorating the city center, revitalizing neighborhoods, and stabilizing the city’s decline.
Bosnians in Utica, N.Y., along with Somalis, Burmese, and other refugees stemmed the tide of population decline there and have contributed to such a high degree that the mayor of Utica continues to welcome refugees, including Syrians. A PBS NewsHour report highlights that “Utica’s commitment to resettle refugees isn’t purely humanitarian — its open-door policy is also a pioneering economic tool for revitalizing the Rust Belt.”
They are social workers, farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, doctors, teachers, engineers and others. They go to school, marry, raise families, and contribute to our ethos of hard work, striving, and resilience.
When we are welcoming, a national characteristic rooted in our founders’ search for freedom from persecution and tyranny, we strengthen the social and economic fabric of our towns and cities, and the moral character that has distinguished us. When we malign and shut out refugees, we are not only harming them, we are also limiting our own ability to prosper.
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