Never Mind the Cat-Eating; the Damage to Small Town America is Very Real

Commentary

October 25, 2024

By Brian Lonergan

Americans have been told by their government and media that disinformation is all around them, and that is not entirely false. One of the corporate media’s favorite tactics for swaying public opinion is to isolate a small part of a story, claim to debunk it, and then to declare the larger point of the story also to be without merit.

We saw a glaring example of this recently with the story out of Springfield, Ohio. The town of less than 60,000 residents between Dayton and Columbus has been swamped over the last few years with more than 20,000 migrants from Haiti. At a townhall meeting in August, residents aired their grievances about the impact of the migrants on the town, including accounts that migrants were catching ducks and cats for the purpose of eating them.    

The sensational claim was all the media needed to draw attention away from the larger issues surrounding the mass importation of migrants into small-town America. The usual gaggle of self-appointed fact-checkers announced there was “no evidence” to the claims, discounting the numerous testimonials of residents who said they had seen migrants with cats or ducks. Keep in mind this is the same media that promoted, with almost no scrutiny, the evidence-free testimony of one woman that a Supreme Court nominee with an impeccable reputation was actually a rapacious sex offender.

In an age of 24-hour news cycles and decreased attention spans, the government-media industrial complex thought it had put the Springfield story to bed. In their eyes, the cats-and-ducks sidebar lacked hard evidence, and it followed from that lack of hard evidence that any notion of Springfield as a community suffering because of runaway migration must also be untrue. This conclusion is patently false.

Whatever one wants to believe about the eating habits of migrants, the unavoidable truth is that residents of Springfield and other towns like it are being crushed by a tsunami of foreign nationals brought here by the Biden Administration. Springfield had a housing shortage prior to the arrival of Haitian migrants, and the situation is now critical. City Manager Bryan Heck reported that Springfield does not have the capacity to sustain the current pace of illegal immigration. 

Whatever one wants to believe about the eating habits of migrants, the unavoidable truth is that residents of Springfield and other towns like it are being crushed by a tsunami of foreign nationals brought here by the Biden Administration.

Residents of Springfield have also reported soaring car insurance rates. Carriers have told customers the increase is due to the spike in auto accidents brought on by the arrival of Haitian migrants. The influx has also strained the town’s social safety net, schools and medical centers.

In 2023, a 36-year-old Haitian migrant driving without a license crashed into a school bus, hospitalizing 20 children, and killing 11-year-old Aiden Clark.

These are just the most direct consequences of a surrendered border. Fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45. U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized an estimated 1.1 billion doses of fentanyl at the southern border in 2023. Even if Americans are not victims of crime or of the recklessness of foreign nationals who are here illegally, they and their families are put at risk of dying from the lethal drugs our government is allowing to pass through our criminally mismanaged borders.

Other communities have had similar experiences to Springfield. They include Logansport, Indiana, which has seen more than 11,000 migrants arrive in a town that had just 38,000 people in 2020. Residents of Lockland Village, Ohio near Cincinnati report the community’s population of 3,470 is being overrun by a 2,800 percent increase in Mauritanian migrants.

Whenever residents speak up about these problems, our ruling class is quick to remind them of their obligation to be compassionate to others and lecture that America has a tradition of welcoming in the less fortunate. Lost in all this lofty, idealistic talk is the obligation of our political leaders to safeguard the citizens of their own country. The social contract, whereby citizens agree to be subject to the rule of law in exchange for the government’s protection of their rights, has been broken. American citizens are still expected to follow the law, but their government now prioritizes foreign nationals over them.

Residents of hurricane-ravaged western North Carolina are told to fill out forms to possibly collect $750 in federal assistance, while illegal aliens are showered with smart phones, luxury hotel rooms, free flights, and other benefits that citizens do not enjoy. New Yorkers see illegal aliens committing violent crimes in broad daylight and are released from police custody the same day. The residents of migrant-sacked communities like Springfield are just the latest victims of callous disrespect from their government.

As our country struggles with the wounds and spasms brought on by this mindless immigration policy, Americans need to be cognizant of the tactics the media uses to downplay stories that do not conform to its agenda while promoting those that condition people to accept what is an increasingly unacceptable status quo.

Brian Lonergan is director of communications at the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, D.C, and co-host of IRLI’s “No Border, No Country” podcast.

Also published at Chronicles, October 25, 2024.

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

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