Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has written a remarkable piece in The New York Times taking Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to task for their demagoguery about the Haitian influx into Springfield, a small city in the western part of the state. This is striking—it’s rare for a governor to criticize the top of his party’s ticket quite this publicly.
But DeWine’s piece is worth dwelling on for another reason: It lays bare an essential truth about the Springfield controversy, and why the MAGA movement has seized on it so fervently. For Trump and key elements of MAGA, Springfield is not really about border security, or the proper pace of legal immigration, or how best to assimilate new arrivals. Rather, it’s a stand-in for a subterranean argument about the desirable ethnoracial makeup of the American population.
In his piece, DeWine, a Republican, defends the decision to allow thousands of Haitians to move to this city of 60,000 people. He recaps arguments you’ve heard: The city badly needed workers, and Haitians are there legally to work. Many residents have welcomed the newcomers. Haitians have revitalized another Rust Belt city coping with postindustrial population decline.
DeWine also indicts Trump and Vance in surprisingly harsh terms for a Republican. “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” he writes, noting that their behavior “hurts the city and its people.” But another passage from DeWine merits attention:
The Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border is a very important issue that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are talking about and one that the American people are rightfully deeply concerned about. But their verbal attacks against these Haitians—who are legally present in the United States—dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.
There’s something quaint in DeWine’s assumption that this might move Trump and Vance. They may be right to draw attention to the Biden administration’s border mismanagement, DeWine suggests, but in attacking Haitians so viciously, they are allowing that argument to be tainted by intimations of cruelty and racism, alienating swing voters. Surely Trump and Vance will see the political error of their ways!
Yet this misses how Trump—and perhaps Vance, though this is murkier—really understands this issue. Trump actively wants the argument over immigration to be as charged with hate and rage as possible. He doesn’t think that will alienate swing voters. He thinks it will activate their latent MAGA tendencies. The picture Trump is seizing on Springfield to invoke—that of a largely white, innocent heartland town getting ravaged by dark, alien hordes who basically constitute a subhuman species—simply cannot be a distraction from the immigration debate. To Trump, it is the immigration debate.
An underappreciated difference between Trump and Vance is that Trump is explicit on that point, while Vance is not. Trump says that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” that we should not let in people from “shithole countries” like Haiti, and that other countries are sending millions of people “from prisons, from insane asylums, from mental institutions.” Those and other statements constitute quasi-open declarations that the problem with immigration is racial contamination. They drain migrants of any trace of basic humanity that might make claims on our sense of justice. When Trump says Haitians are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats,” it’s more of that dehumanization game.
So what exactly does Vance believe about all this?
After Vance got caught out spreading falsehoods about Haitians eating house pets, he angrily insisted there’s no racial component to his assertions about their impact on Springfield. He declared that he objects to the scale and speed of their influx and their effect on housing costs and public health.
Local leaders and business owners have said that social tensions are real but manageable, that Haitians are filling real labor shortages, and that Haitians are hardworking, upstanding people who carry out jobs that locals won’t do. But Vance has an answer here too. He has suggested that when local employers hail Haitians’ willingness to work, employers are using them as tools to drive down wages, and that native-born Americans are the real victims of that.
A charitable interpretation of all this was offered by Ross Douthat on the Times’ Matter of Opinion podcast. As Douthat put it, Vance wants to “stand up for the interests” of working-class Americans “against an economy that would prefer to employ people” like Haitians, who are here of desperation and will take lower wages, “rather than them.”
When Vance is on his best behavior, as he also was during a separate interview with Douthat, he does center his arguments around immigration’s material impact on American workers. Vance’s broader economic argument—that more immigration dilutes workers’ bargaining power, driving down wages—is wrong on the substance, as Eric Levitz details. In Springfield, Haitian arrivals helped boost the local economy and drive wage growth. But that aside, it’s hard to square any innocent construction of Vance’s intentions—that he piously hopes to prompt debate—with how deeply debased his public performance has become.
For instance, Vance’s staff was told early on that the pet-eating claim was false; he escalated it. Vance urged supporters to keep the memes coming after the debunkings became more conclusive. Vance keeps insisting that due to Haitians, communicable diseases have “skyrocketed,” even though this is just false and he is surely aware of this particular trope’s dark and despicable history. And Vance has vowed to keep calling Haitians “illegal,” which he dresses up as mere questioning of the validity of their legal status but is actually meant to excite the base with the specter of their mass expulsions.
Douthat did admit on that podcast that Vance is wrong for employing demagoguery to steer the public argument. But this doesn’t go far enough. What needs to be asked is this: Is it even true that Vance is purely out to inspire public deliberation over immigration’s impact on American heartlanders? Isn’t Vance also plainly trying to energize the very same sentiments in the MAGA base that Trump is stirring up with his more explicit appeals? Vance’s public conduct is much more compatible with this latter explanation.
DeWine’s piece tried to address all these surging sentiments. He appealed to Americans’ sense of fairness and solidarity toward immigrants. He depicted them as hardworking people who have struggled against great adversity and deserve our admiration and respect. He noted that Haitians are assimilating.
But here again, this just shows how diametrically at odds with such arguments Trump and large swaths of MAGA truly are. It’s obvious from Trump’s own rhetoric, and from the eager amplification of all these lies about Haitians in MAGA-aligned media, that to Trump and much of MAGA, the idea that the Haitians might be assimilating successfully is a cause for fear and loathing, not something to feel good about.
Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute finds that 67 percent of respondents with a positive view of Trump agree that undocumented immigrants “are poisoning the blood of our country.” Sixty-three percent agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Among overall Americans, large majorities disagree with both claims.
It’s hard to know how deeply felt or significant those sentiments among Trump supporters truly are. We do know, however, that Vance is perfectly happy to exacerbate them.
But Vance can’t have it both ways. He wants to exist in a place where respectable columnists will nod along as he furrows his brow about the effects of immigration flows on local labor markets—even as he simultaneously feeds vile and hateful sentiments toward immigrants that have nothing whatsoever to do with inspiring polite policy discourse.
In his piece, DeWine writes that the Springfield horrors that Trump is describing are unrecognizable to him. But that’s because for Trump, the argument over Springfield has nothing to do with what’s actually happening in Springfield. It’s about fomenting violent hatreds in order to seize power. What must be asked of Vance is why this gives him no discernible qualms whatsoever. He knows what Trump is up to perfectly well—and he’s absolutely willing to go along with every bit of it.
