Donald Trump’s running mate went after the media and continued to take aim at the community rocked by his racist lie.
Sen. JD Vance gave a “challenge” for Americans to visit Springfield, Ohio, on Saturday as he continued to take aim at the community rocked by a racist lie pushed by him and former President Donald Trump.
Vance, at a Pennsylvania campaign rally, addressed a reporter who was booed for asking about his comments that he’s willing to “create stories” should it mean the media pays attention to the false narrative that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield.
…
His remarks come after the Ohio city has faced over 30 bomb threats and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue claiming emergency powers in order “to mitigate public safety concerns.”
🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
Now, among other things, some resident seeds the pets thing on a local Facebook group.
I lived there for almost a decade, about a decade and a half ago. It was so run down and dying then. People wouldn’t come see us there that we had known all our lives because it was so dangerous. Pizza places wouldn’t deliver down our street, we would have to walk to the main corner to get delivery. We paid a crack head to watch our house while we were away for a weekend.
I was in disbelief back when I heard about the factories deciding to build there after we had up and left… finally, after barely scraping enough together from living and working there. I wondered how they would fare but didn’t follow up on it then.
I researched and verified everything you said above, and informed some other family on Fb, that was trying to stir the shit. They would hear none of it.