The immigrant situation in Springfield is complex: not helped by the Trump false “eating cats” claims. A city with a 2020 population of just under 60,000 has taken in at least 15,000 immigrants since then, almost all from Haiti. Liberals emphasize how these immigrants have revitalized Springfield, minimizing the social strains caused and all but ignoring how young white men may have been harmed. This is in sharp contrast to previous situations in which black Americans have been potential victims of otherwise successful policies.
The Haitian immigrant, we are told, came there by word-of-mouth, attracted by cheap cost-of-living and decent jobs. What is not specified is how many of them were actively recruited through the government parole system that allows companies to sponsor multiple individuals. Ross McGregor, CEO of the Springfield manufacturer Pentaflex and former state lawmaker, said his company chose a staffing agency to help with hiring after vetting to make sure the company was following proper procedure regarding things like immigration. The company routinely brought in Haitian immigrants. McGregor points to their work ethics:
Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don’t have a drug problem. They’ll stay at their machine. They’ll achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so in general, that’s a stark difference from what we’re used to in our community.
What McGregor is alluding to is the alleged lack of similar work ethics among young white men. The New York Times claims, “Many young, working-age people had descended into addiction. Others shunned entry-level, rote work altogether, employers said.”
This rationale is problematic. George Borjas noted that this was the same rationale for why immigrant employment in chicken-processing plants was necessary, it was claimed, because native-born workers found those jobs unacceptable. He pointed to the dynamics at Crider, Inc., a chicken-processing plant in Georgia that lost 75 percent of its workforce when raided by immigration agents. Shortly afterwards, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages sufficient to attract native-born workers.
More generally, studies consistently find that immigration lowers wages in occupations that hire low-wage workers. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, reported in May 2024: “Sectors with some of the highest immigrant workforce growth, such as construction and manufacturing, saw the sharpest deceleration in wage growth (especially average hourly earnings) from 2021 to 2023.
This blaming-the-victim narrative was unacceptable when the potential downside of successes was the black community. In the late 1980s, black workers were driven out of manufacturing employment. Between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, the share of midwestern young black men in manufacturing fell from 40% to 10% as firms fled central-city locations. However, at least part of the decline was the increasing hiring of Latino workers. They were hardworking and used networking to provide companies with other Latinos as new hires.
Did progressives view this as a successful integration of immigrant newcomers, revitalizing lagging urban manufacturing employment. NOT!! Instead, as Joleen Kirschenmann and Kathryn Nickerman argued in a widely quoted paper, firms were replacing black workers who would stand up for their rights with a more docile, lower-paid workforce. Somehow this narrative is not acceptable when its young white men being replaced by new immigrants.
Similarly, many observers have pointed to gentrification as revitalizing some poor neighborhoods. Indeed, Warren Buffett’s Purpose Built Communities points to more than twenty “success” stories. However, the same liberals who are touting Springfield’s success, vehemently reject Buffett’s vision. They point to the displacement of poor black families despite studies that finds no adverse displacement effects.
Indeed, the idea that young white men reject repetitive manufacturing employment may reflect the poverty-wage levels that the employers can pay their Haitian workers. From scarcely a few hundred in 2021, the number of Haitian immigrants in Springfield on Medicaid reached 8,000 by 2024; more than half of their population there.
While Haitians have prospered in Springfield others have not: unemployment rose from 3.7% in October 2023 to 5.1% by April 2024. Immigration also had a substantial impact on Springfield’s housing costs. The number of affordable housing vouchers fell as landlords moved to market-based rents that were rising in the face of higher demand. Local rents increased at the third-fastest pace among cities from May 2022 through the end of 2023, rising at a 14.6% annualized pace, data from Zillow shows. And many social services were strained by the influx.
For me, this is just one more example of the indifference if not hostility of the liberal professional class to the plight of working-class white men. By virtually every metric, men are falling behind women. And yet politicians and policy makers are unwilling to take any significant steps to ameliorate the problem because it would weaken the efforts to integrate women and immigrants into the American educational system and economy. There is much more energy to eliminate gender disparities in stem fields than the fact that less than 40% of college graduates are men. And as Springfield indicates, the preference of employers for hardworking, pliable immigrants takes precedent over the need to transition troubled young white men into the workforce. How much longer can we allow this indifference to sacrifice the futures of many young white and increasingly black and Latino men?
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