Springfield Retrospective: How the Groundwork Was Laid For Replacing Ohio Workers
This post was originally published on The Heartland Beat
My hometown of Springfield, Ohio has certainly seen its fair share of controversy as of late. Growing up in the small city of 58,000, it was never without its issues. However, the public mention of the city from the mouth of now President Trump during the last presidential debate left and opening for a larger conversation on the impacts of migration. But while the nation looked at the issue of the great Haitian migration in general, it took little time to address the root causes of the issue.
Now that the Trump Administration has ended the Temporary Protective Status extension, it seems as good a time as any to look beyond the blatant abuse of the TPS sponsorship program or the legitimized trafficking by government sanctioned companies like First Diversity and look at the origin of an agenda which laid the groundwork for this operation to even occur in the first place. Without this machination, Springfield would never have faced such turmoil and without recognizing it, other cities may be doomed to face the same fate.
As someone who grew up in Springfield at the height of globalization, I saw first hand the impact of fleeing manufacturing and the destruction it left in its wake for both my own family and thousands more who were employed by companies such as Harvester International, BMY and others. Citizens who believed in the Reagan era promise of trickle down economics not realizing that the wealth that trickles down, only does so if you are part of the cut. Historically, the city of Springfield being located between two major cities like Dayton and Columbus meant that, paired with its strong manufacturing centers, working class families thrived with ample economic opportunities until the late 80s and early 90s.
As international trade deals opened up pathways for companies to leave and employ cheap labor overseas, the incentive to stay diminished. Coming from a working class family, I watched as my father lost his job at BMY and the mall my mother worked at slowly lost store after store turning into an abandoned lot as residents began losing income, unable to spend on clothes, furniture and toys. Make no mistake, the economic policies and trade deals that began with Reagan and carried through Clinton were utterly disastrous for towns like Springfield. From that point on, the only sectors that survived became chain restaurants and the still surviving two Wal-Marts.
Springfield suffered through economic depression for much of my young adult life, leading to massive amounts of the population fleeing to areas where jobs could still be found. Drug trafficking and worse became a norm in the city. As a consequence of this, housing became incredibly cheap as the standard of living plummeted. Between 1970 and 2010, Springfield lost nearly a quarter of its population and suffered the largest hit on median income of any major city in the United States. To say there were no opportunities growing up would be an understatement.
However, even though standard manufacturing had all but abandoned Springfield, due to the close proximity of Wright-Patterson Airforce base in Dayton and the Air National Guard base in Springfield, a potential new avenue of manufacturing was beginning to open at the height of the “War on Terror" thanks to the reliance on drone technology.
In 2010, the Dayton Regional Israel Trade Alliance, or DRITA was formed to promote economic development of Israeli based defense companies in the Montgomery County area. Over the next ten years, the economy of the Dayton region became intertwined with that of Israel.
During this time, Israeli based companies became increasingly tied to educational and certification institutes in the region, such as The National UAS Training and Certification Center at Sinclair. In 2020, Springfield based manufacturer Tool Tech secured a massive contract with an Israeli defense contractor Ashot Ashkelon. Due to all of this new “economic development”, the Dayton Development Coalition partnered with the United Stated Department of Commerce to develop an economic plan for the region, which would include Clark County. The plan included equity policy goals to help secure federal funding for ‘economic development,’ pitting cities across the country in competition for the funds. For a city like Springfield, that had already been left in the cold, the concept must have sounded enticing, though it lacked the footing to make any moves.
The 2012 Dayton Region Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy put a target over the aerospace field to specifically make the development of unmanned craft a focal point of economic development for the area.
This meant increasing the Dayton and Springfield regions share of federal development contracts. This also consequently meant the region would need to submit to other federal policy goals as well as they developed.
The Replacement Cometh
Obviously the main component of any Economic Development Plan, especially one facilitating federal and international contract comes with some strings. Some of which deal with the question of how one will build a ‘resilient’ workforce in a town that has seen population and economic decline for over a decade. This is where organizations like Welcoming America come in.
Welcoming America was founded in 2009 by David Lubell, specifically as a means of pushing policies into local communities which would facilitate greater immigration placement into regions and facilitate their ‘integration’ (not assimilation). The Welcoming America policy platform focuses on selling local community leaders on the economic benefits of essentially replacing their local population with cheap immigrant workers using arguments based on economic appeals externally and appeals to emotions when faced with criticism from within the community.
Lubell’s message to local communities was made clear in his Ted Talk, ‘you can benefit from this, or have it thrust on you anyways.’ Dayton was one of the first Ohio communities that jumped on the bandwagon, prompted by their deep federal development ties with foreign defense contractors, hoping to not be ‘left behind.’
Welcoming America has worked closely with HIAS in parts of the country to facilitate mass immigration placement, with both having unusual and potent access to the halls of power. Lubell’s organization would eventually partner with the Obama administration, after Lubell demanded a shift in federal immigration policy, on a new comprehensive immigration strategy combining efforts from HUD, Homeland Security and others to organize and construct a blueprint for mass migration into the United States. The plan used communities like Dayton specifically as a model, nothing they would need to base their economic policies on ‘immigrant economic development.’
As defined by Lubell’s partner Steve Tobocman, Immigrant Economic Development puts the focus on an immigrant labor force to make the region more ‘competitive’ to attract companies with ‘global talent needs.’ In translation, cheap labor for companies to save them needing to travel overseas and get it themselves. Part of the outline strategy was to directly connect job opportunities in the region to staffing agencies which would better facilitate the shipping of said immigrant labor back to the U.S. These strategies of course bypass the local labor pool completely, leaving further economic destitution in their wake.
While it is at this point well-known the part staffing agencies like First Diversity played in this endeavor, it may not have been widely known that this was part of a broader federal policy strategy initially ordered of Obama by Lubell and blueprinted by Tobocman with specific targets on the Dayton and, consequently, Springfield region through the ‘Welcome Dayton’ plan and eventually then ‘Welcome Springfield’ plan.
The consequences of these ‘plans’ were earth shattering. By becoming part of the ‘Welcoming’ initiative, community governments needed to agree to several standards and criteria including not criticizing immigration initiatives and prioritizing housing through HUD development for immigrants over native born citizens. Additionally, law enforcement would be asked to ignore the immigration status of potential interactions and avoid deportation whenever possible. We have already discussed how Clark County has refused to prosecute misdemeanor crimes of Haitian immigrants. This is most likely the reason. In short, agreeing to become part of this endeavor meant the local government would be violating the social contract and putting the priorities of foreign communities thousands of miles away over those of their constituents.
The arguments from Lubell’s Welcoming America organization are of course, hollow. We will set aside the question of how Lubell amassed such influence that he could order the President to reshape national immigration strategy as certainly one to investigate later (hint). More straightforward is the question of what benefit befalls a community to cede their economic opportunities and prop up a foreign imported workforce? When the Federal government vows to invest in a local community why wouldn’t citizens take the jobs themselves and prosper from the economic development they paid for through their own tax dollars?
The answer is, of course, that these are manipulative strategies hiding a much deeper agenda. There is no benefit to the citizen to sacrifice the prosperity of their home and people to a foreign force and see their children made homeless and starving. Instead, Lubell’s Welcoming agenda is designed specifically to alter the demographics of a region and destroy it from within through replacement migration.
In the Welcoming Global Network ‘Diverse by Design’ report from 2012, they specifically outline their goal to make the southwest Ohio region ‘more reflective demographically’ to that of the larger nation. In short, the rustbelt is too white and needs to be changed.
The Springfield Domino Falls
Being little more than a suburb of Dayton in the days since globalism demolished Springfield’s manufacturing center, it was only a matter of time before Springfield fell to the same ‘Welcome’ initiative that Dayton nearly defined for the nation. The Welcome Springfield initiative was spearheaded by defrocked Cedarville University VP of Student Life Carl Ruby, who ‘resigned’ at the behest of the Baptist university when his 'liberal activism' stood in direct opposition to the conservative principles of the institution.
Following the Welcome model, Ruby encouraged policies of Immigrant Economic Development, first with illegal immigrants from Mexico in 2014, even encouraging them to invest their ‘vast wealth of capital’ into property management. Springfield eventually fell to the Welcome initiative in 2014. The result of this has been exactly what we have witnessed over the last few years. The county commissioners formed a landbank to better facilitate access to millions in federal tax dollars and subsidies for building new homes for the planned influx of migrants and provided tax abatements for new businesses coming into the area to sweeten the deal for developers who were looking at the prospect of extremely cheap, federally subsidized labor at hardly any cost.
From 2014-2019 the sales pitch to the residents of Springfield was the same as it was for most of the upcoming development projects in culturally homogenous regions of the state; new jobs, new opportunities and a shining new city on a hill. But none of these promises are for you, the citizens, whose families built this country. The result of the Welcome Springfield Initiative has been exactly what the intention was from the beginning. Already struggling after the disastrous economic policies of multiple federal puppets, the final nail in the coffin for Springfield was hit. True to the Welcome plan, federal dollars flooded the city, facilitating the transport of 20,000 Haitians into the city of 58,000, structured by staffing agencies and nonprofits supporting them with direct job pipelines for a fraction of the price of domestic workers and government subsidy programs to keep them afloat. Citizens endured through a massive increase in crime ignored by the local justice system and a growing homeless problem as the cost of living rose due to demand, literally kicking citizens out into the streets where the commissioners have ordered police to stop other residents from helping.
If Dayton is indeed the poster child for the Welcome initiatives, then Springfield is its bastard brother, living up to the goals and strategies of Welcoming America in the most blatant ways. The city has become a powder keg of tension under the rule of a blatantly corrupt administration that takes millions in federal grants for little to no benefit to the citizens and has cared little for the plight of their actual constituents. While the national attention towards Springfield was important, more so is the recognition of how it became so shameful in the first place and why it is unlikely to get much more attention once, or if, the current influx eventually leave.
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