Trump is right: mass migration is tearing America apart

The citizens of towns like Springfield who don’t want America to adopt Haitian norms are ignored by elite liberals

Springfield, Ohio, is a small midwestern town of fewer than 60,000 residents. It’s also host to a sudden influx of as many as 15,000 refugees from Haiti. The shock to schools, hospitals, welfare services, and the availability of housing from the immigrant surge is staggering. It would be hard enough for a larger city to absorb such numbers in just a short time. To the citizens of places as small as Springfield, it can feel like being colonised.
The refugees are almost certainly not eating pet cats and dogs. Yet by alluding to such wild rumors Donald Trump succeeded in getting the national media to talk about Springfield’s transformation. It took a myth to bring the truth to light. 
And it took Trump to put small-town Ohio on the political map. His voters are driven not by fear of immigrants but by outrage at the way their own lives have been upended by policies made far away in Washington, DC – or indeed in foreign capitals from Port-au-Prince to Beijing. Without Trump, the discontented citizens of Springfields across America go unheard.
There are local businesses that welcome a new Haitian workforce. Small-town politicians, in turn, want the growing tax revenue that comes from the businesses, as well as state and federal aid dollars doled out in support of the immigrants.
These economic incentives, however, are anti-democratic, separating the interests of local elites from those of the ordinary citizen who has to deal with overcrowded hospitals and roads made more hazardous by immigrants without drivers’ licenses. Springfield was a scene of tragedy last year when an immigrant driving without a license plowed his car into a school bus, killing an 11-year-old boy. These costs don’t appear on the balance sheets of those who say mass immigration is only beneficial.
There are as yet no credible reports of immigrants in Springfield eating anyone’s pet. But in Springfield and elsewhere wildlife can suffer. Geese and ducks that residents enjoy feeding in the park are treated like livestock by outsiders. In Manlius, New York earlier this year an 18-year-old of Burmese immigrant background pleaded guilty to animal cruelty in connection to the killing and eating of Faye, a mute swan that had been donated to the village in 2010. The young man’s lawyer claimed the incident was a “clash of cultures.” In New York City, animal rescuers in Queens this month noted a sharp rise in abuse linked to sacrificial rituals involving Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean communities. 
Many other cultures simply do not have the same respect for certain animals, whether wild or domestic, that Americans typically have. And the residents of Springfield or Manlius have no way of knowing what Haiti or Burma considers an acceptable catch. Concern for family cats and dogs is a natural response to being confronted with such violent behavior toward other animals Americans are used to treating kindly. 
Yet the citizens of towns who don’t want America to adopt Haitian norms are ignored by elite liberals – often even by elite businessmen and politicians in their own neighborhoods – until Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric draws attention to their concerns. Then those concerns are denounced in the elite media as so much racism fueled by misinformation. Trump’s critics brand him a threat to democracy. The truth is that Trump reintroduces a modicum of democracy into what is otherwise a closed discourse. 
There is a Springfield in virtually every state in the country. (This is why the hometown of Homer Simpson is a Springfield – it could be anywhere in America.) Mass immigration and refugee resettlement programs are changing the lives of Springfielders in every way without their consent. Millions of these voters see Donald Trump, for all his loose talk, as their only hope for reclaiming self-determination. At least he hears what they have to say about immigration.