Springfield Finds Itself in the Spotlight

The recent thrust of Springfield in the national spotlight isn't helping the community.

What Do You See?

To start off, I want you to take about a minute and a half and watch this video and follow the directions.

Were you surprised? Where you shocked?

What was the lesson?

I tend to believe the lesson is that we will inevitably find what we are looking for — and we will often ignore those things that are happening in plain sight.

This video immediately came to mind as I was thinking about how a neighboring community, Springfield, was recently thrust into the national spotlight as it is the epicenter of a national political discussion that has hit real close to home.

Springfield: A Community Hit Hard

Local readers of this newsletter may not think how Haitian refugees in a neighboring county are impacting our own community. But, the discussion around Springfield is too sharp not to address and the linkages exist, if we are willing to see those things that are hiding in plain slight.

For nearly my entire life, Springfield has been a downtrodden community. Perhaps, even more dramatic was how Springfield was rarely brought up in conversations and “felt” so far away. I say that because I could count on one hand the times I went to Springfield as a kid, even though it was twenty miles away. I remember going to the Showbiz Pizza (kids of the ‘80s will fondly remember that plance) and the Gold Circle department store. Yet, Dayton was roughly the same distance, and it seemed that our family went to that city quite a bit.

Regardless of my own memories, the once industrial community has fallen on hard times. In 1960, over 82,000 people called Springfield home, sixty years later, the population shrunk to 58,000. This type of population collapse leads to vacant housing and decreased economic opportunities.

To fight the trend, Springfield has tried to position itself, much like the entire Miami Valley, as an industrial and logistics hub. Economic developers throughout the region have and are touting are region as a place with a reasonable (almost cheap) cost of living and plenty of job opportunities, even for those that don’t have a college education. And after years of spreading this message, what no one saw coming is that these are the types of environments that are largely attractive to people trying to make a living here in the United States, no matter where they are coming from.

The Making of Modern Springfield

Over the past few years, Springfield has seen an increase in economic activity. New industrial businesses and warehouses have been sprouting up along Interstate 70 and with that came an influx of thousands — perhaps as many as 20,000 - of Haitian Creoles that are legally here under a “Temporary Protective Status” program that allows individuals from precarious places to find a way to make a living here in the United States.

The program is designed to be just that —- temporary. And as the old saying goes, nothing is as permanent as a government program. But, this isn’t entirely the federal government’s fault.

The humane action to allow foreigners to come to the country to flee political persecution or civil unrest is not an unheard concept and is often well appreciated. For example, a fair number of Cubans fled this island after the Communist take over of Castro and found refuge in the United States, notably in South Florida. These immigrants found jobs, started families and found a way to achieve the American Dream. The same rough model helped bring Haitians here to help flee political turmoil and political unrest in their homeland. It’s not an understatement to say the roughest and most volatile country in the Western Hemisphere is Haiti.

But what happens when young and ambitious Haitians leave? They come to the place where there is and has always been opportunity — the United States. And by extension, the odds of Haiti finding a way out of its own political turmoil becomes less and less, when some of the most industrious and inspired leave. Few politicians, regardless of their backgrounds and beliefs, are going to send refugees home to an even worse situation than where they came from. Thus, the temporary program becomes more and more permanent.

And so, here we are, a community ripe with housing and jobs has become a temporary home to thousands of strangers that with each passing day, have less and less incentive to go back to a more hostile and violent homeland.

That’s a rough and dirty way to explain how we got where things stand in Springfield.

The Frustration with National Politics

And this past week, as we all saw Springfield unwittingly take the national spotlight, it became clear that there is a huge difference between the local politics and the national politics that are being played out in real time.

Immigration and border security has taken center stage in this year’s Presidential Election. And while this publication has a hard line against discussing national politics, the local implications are too great to ignore the impact that his issue is having here at home.

Nationally, it’s become clear that there is one party that doesn’t seem to think that there is a crisis at all. They take a look at what is happening in Springfield and tend to think that while there might be some problems, overall Springfield is on the mend. Plenty of new jobs, vacant housing units are filled, economic opportunities are created, the downtrodden are lifted-up. What more could a distressed midwestern city want? The issue with this approach is that this is the exact same attitude that caused the same party to fall out of favor with many of their diehard supporters. This party felt that it was more important, through trade deals like NAFTA, to bring subsistence farmers in Mexico out of poverty than to sustain the economic gains earned here at home that helped secure the middle class.

Unfortunately, the other party is no better. The other party has done nothing to provide any solutions to the problems at hand, but they have done an excellent job of pointing out the problems that exist, often through methods of telling exaggerated stories that paint the entire community in a less than helpful light.

In real time, Springfield is seeing both major parties wash their hands of either the problem or the solution and the city and their residents are seeing themselves being used as nothing more than a pawn in a game of national politics. It goes back to the video at the top of the screen, what you are looking for you will find — and often miss the things in plain sight.

Local Leaders Need Help, Not Platitudes

And it’s the local leaders that can’t let those things in plain sight go unnoticed. They are the ones hearing complaints from citizens, they are the ones that are seeing the police calls for another traffic accident, they are the ones that are struggling to teach kids that speak English as a second language. These are real problems - with few obvious solutions.

Telling all 20,000 Haitians in Springfield to pack up and leave isn’t exactly a viable option. The economic impact would be detrimental not only to Springfield, but to the region; as an aside, there are Haitians that are employed in our own community. Housing vacancy would climb overnight, and economic opportunities would grind to a halt. But, by the same token, integrating 20,000 Haitians to a midwestern city is not an easy task. Even every day tasks, such as driving one’s own car, is becoming challenging. Work that should have been done years is ago to help intergrate new arrivals has been delayed and the community is paying for those consequences.

Leaders in Springfield need real and tangible help, not just electioneering platitudes. They need one party to realize that there is a real, tangible crisis. They need the other party to articulate some concept of what a workable solution might look like. Furthermore, they need both federal and state officials to collaborate with the leaders on the ground to help the entire Springfield community.

Other Communities Can’t Be Naive

And while, we might think here in Miami County that we are immune to what is happening in neighboring Springfield, we can’t be naive. As previously stated, Haitian immigrants are gainfully employed in our communities here. At the same time, local communities are seeing the same type of influx of immigrants that is causing real stress to the government services that are offered. This publication covered how one rural school district here in Miami County is dealing with the strain:

What Civic Capacity Is All About

This publication is all about having helpful and honest conversations about what is happening in our communities and by involving, inspiring and including people to be a part of the decision-making processes in the places we call home. And as part of those conversations, we have to realize that it is our local government (not our federal government or state government) that is there to solve our community’s problems — many times it’s up to us.

And if we are going to have conversations and collaborate on local solutions, we have to come to the realization that we need to put our focus on our community, whether here or in Springfield, and be open and willing to look at those things that are hiding in plain sight, even if those in national politics don’t want us to.

What Do You Think?

Today’s topic was pretty heavy. What do you think? Our paid subscribers are welcome to put their ideas and insights in the comment thread.

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