What does JD Vance—and Springfield, Ohio—owe Haitian immigrants?

An immigrant community being victimized because a United States Senator spread an unsubstantiated rumor about them eating their neighbors’ pets would sound heavy-handed if scripted for TV. And yet, that has been the story of this autumn. 

It all started this summer with vice presidential candidate JD Vance testifying to Congress about the strain put on resources in the city of Springfield, Ohio, by a “surge” there in the Haitian immigrant population. In August of this year, a post went viral on Facebook from a Springfield resident accusing her Haitian neighbors of eating other residents’ pets and hunting ducks and geese at a local park. Its popularity was helped in great part by Vance boosting the accusations from his official Twitter account.

Former president Donald Trump echoed the accusations on the national stage during his first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. Subsequently, Vance appeared on CNN and, upon being confronted with the evidence that the rumors were unsubstantiated, came dangerously close to acknowledging that he had woven the rumors into a full-blown lie for the purpose of getting media attention for his pet issue—no pun intended.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” said the senator, “then that’s what I’m going to do… I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies.” 

This is a particularly vicious piece of demagoguery, but the ends-means justification should strike a familiar chord with those who remember such classic hits as Chris Rufo’s straw-man version of critical race theory—openly admitted by him to be a fraudulent rhetorical device to whip up a frenzy against the alleged leftist domination of public schools. This brand of rhetoric is also representative of a decades-old problem in Catholic social thought that Vance has, intentionally or otherwise, illustrated perfectly.

For starters, the supposedly good ends with which Vance is justifying his fallacious means are completely fabricated. The narrative is that of a small American town being choked to death by an invasion of illegal immigrants imposed on the town by a failed border policy. The truth, however, is that Springfield has long suffered urban decay brought about by Rust Belt deindustrialization. Its decline predates its immigrant population by a fair bit and can in no way be blamed on them. The influx of Haitian immigrants to Springfield has been ongoing since approximately 2018, having ramped up in recent years due to the ongoing crisis in Haiti. None of these immigrants are illegal; they are beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) granted to many Haitian nationals. This is not a novelty of the Biden-Harris administration either; Haitians had previously been granted this status in 2011 under Barack Obama. 

Perhaps most important, these were not people “dumped” into Springfield, but rather attracted by labor shortages among companies seeking to re-invest in the town. The presence of Haitian immigrants in Ohio has contributed enormously to the economic and cultural revitalization of the town, whose death has been symbolic on a national level.

This is not to say that there aren’t very real problems associated with Haitian immigration to Springfield. This is inevitable in a dying city that fairly recently experienced sharp population growth from an impoverished, largely non-English-speaking group. Springfield’s ongoing decline has left it incapable of supporting its growing population, and shortages in affordable housing, healthcare services, and education infrastructure have caused city officials to seek federal assistance. About two-thirds of the city’s population requires English-language assistance, which the city has been poorly equipped to provide, and has required a massive hiring drive for translators proficient in Haitian Creole. A serious problem for the Haitians themselves is the fragility of their legal status, which frustrates their ability to make permanent homes in the U.S. It is telling, though, that the anti-immigrant sentiment in Springfield is not as down-to-earth as attempting to solve fairly straightforward legal and logistical problems presented by the refugees. 

The viral social media post in August was indicative of extreme racial tensions in Springfield, rooted in crude stereotyping and an unneighborly tendency to assume the worst of their Haitian neighbors. The arrival of new immigrants is met with almost reflexive conspiracy theories about them being “bussed in,” and last year saw an anti-immigrant march led by the local racists. Of course, the actual problems in Springfield raise the very obvious question of why Vance is instead persisting with the dog-eating story and the false narrative about illegal immigration. Vance is not attempting to make the case that Springfield needs additional support in order to accommodate a Haitian population who, in any sensible reckoning, are also his constituents. His concerns about illegal immigration are noticeably devoid of any aspiration that these immigrants be granted a pathway to a less ambiguous legal status, and his solution to housing shortages is simply mass deportation. 

The case Vance would like to make is that immigration is a net negative for American cities, that the Springfield Haitians are a drain on the finite resources of their new home, and that these problems are fixed by a more restrictive, less humanitarian approach to immigration.

What Vance is after is probably well-illustrated by the fact that Clark County, Ohio, has been a reliable Republican stronghold in a key swing state since the Bush years. The way he talks about the city makes it clear that he does not view the Haitian population as his constituents, despite the fact that many of them had been there for years prior to his election as senator in 2022. But assuming for the sake of argument that Vance is not trying to disguise political gamesmanship with allusions to a phony moral principle, the flaw is with his moral reasoning, one that implicates not only Vance but others more moderate in thinking the way he does. 

Vance is a new arrival to Catholicism, having converted in 2019, for reasons he openly admits are more intellectual than spiritual. Vance has expressed how Catholic political theology has affected his position on issues such as abortion, in vitro fertilization, and childless people, but he is also fairly frank about the fact that he’s selective about where the influence applies. This, he claims, is reflective of living in a democratic society, where the laws and policies have to be reflective of all of its voting members. The challenge of a believing Catholic to reconcile the moral precepts of the faith with the principles of citizenship in a pluralistic, popular society is certainly not trivial, but honesty requires an admission that doing so involves a fairly explicit hierarchy of goods. What has typically divided Catholics of the left and right is the nature of that ordering of goods, differing political priorities representing differing political alliances and ideological commitments. 

Fr John Augustine Ryan was a seminal proponent of Catholic social teaching in America, an economist and priest who made it his life’s mission to operationalize the vision of social justice found in Pope Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum.” Ryan was a critic of both the prevailing theory of social reform progressivism and of Catholic thought in America. He had the typically scholastic criticism of the moral relativism attendant with American liberal thought, not merely for religious reasons but because he believed it provided a shaky intellectual foundation for meaningful social reform. However, he was not willing to uncritically adopt the mainstream Thomism of the Catholic academy, either, which he found both excessively teleological and reflexively abstract. By this, Ryan meant that a Catholic morality that primarily derives its norms via deduction from moral axioms, and which solely considers the ultimate end for which humans were created—final unity with God—is insufficient. 

In his essay “The Clergy and the Labor Question,” Ryan criticizes no lesser personage than St. Thomas Aquinas, calling the Angelic Doctor’s defense of slavery a “grave error.” St. Thomas, he claimed, had made a critical mistake on the permissibility of slavery because of its contemporary acceptability, the paucity of viewpoints expressed by slaves in the moral literature making the practice seem inevitable, and the combination of the two—making slavery appear as the result of the natural inferiority of enslaved persons rather than occasioned by human greed and injustice towards the weak. Contemporizing the criticism, Ryan takes to task the tendency of the American clergy of his day to overemphasize Pope Leo XIII’s denunciations of socialism rather than his exhortations of justice towards the working man, failing to understand the dire condition of the industrial working class and the according moral urgency of said call for justice. This, according to Ryan, led the clergy to draw eccentric conclusions, such as opposing the labor movement or government-mandated living wages for fear of socialism or encroachment on the traditional rights of private property owners. 

"None of these immigrants are illegal; they are beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) granted to many Haitian nationals."

This willingness to accept or even promote short-term injustice in pursuit of an ostensible higher principle is reflective of two unfortunate tendencies among politically involved Catholics. The first is an excessive preoccupation with law as a vehicle for or illustration of social values, without concern for the law as an instrument of the demands for justice. The second is an unwillingness to grapple with the concrete facts of a particular social problem, or in the case of Vance, a willingness to fabricate a set of alternative facts. With regard to immigration, the Catholic is said to be required to merely engage in abstract balancing tests between compassion towards the immigrant out of charity and respect for the human person, and between the state’s right and duty to secure its borders and enforce the law. These are sound principles, but not if exercised in ignorance of the actual conditions of migrating peoples or without regard to the proximate demands of justice with regard to how those conditions impact the inherent dignity of the human person. 

In the case of Haiti, those moral demands are particularly acute, not only when considering the hellish condition of the home country, but also the unique responsibility that the U.S. has for those conditions. Failed policy is indeed at the root of Haiti’s condition, not in terms of our permissiveness about immigration, but rather multigenerational plundering of the country through high-handed trade policy, decimating its agricultural sector. 

The current political crisis that earned an extension of Haitians’ TPS is the result of decades of U.S. meddling, instability being the rule rather than the exception ever since the U.S.-backed removal of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Salesian priest who became Haiti’s first democratically elected president in 1991. A sizable portion of the forces that assassinated President Jovenel Moïse in 2021 were veterans of American-trained death squads. U.S. political intervention in the wake of that assassination has been supercilious and ineffective, propping up Prime Minister Ariel Henry—who is suspected of having ties to the assassination—over the objection of the Haitian people. 

Allowing the Haitian people to freely immigrate without fear of legal repercussions is the least we could do, and we arguably haven’t sufficiently met the demands of justice, given that TPS provides woefully inadequate legal protections for long-term establishment in a new home. Also consider that one of the presidential tickets this cycle includes a man who was willing to spread vicious myths in support of their mass deportation, and that the current administration has declined to extend those protections further. The fate of Haitian immigrants is very much at the mercy of their hosts.

Vance’s construction of a fantastical version of events is an effort to put his finger on the scale of the moral calculus. He has invented an urgent motive to immediately take drastic action to secure the U.S. borders lest we be overrun by a barbaric horde or have our finite resources strained to the breaking point. He’s hardly alone in this, even if his approach is somewhat uniquely lacking in subtlety. 

For example, an article written by Dr. Kody Cooper for Bishop Robert Barron’s “Word on Fire” earlier this year attempted to attenuate the moral duty to feed and clothe the foreigner, making use of the supposedly Thomistic principle that charity begins at home. Cooper went so far as to advocate for building a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and detaining asylum seekers. Matt Schlapp, a longtime GOP political operative and former co-chair of Catholics for Trump, expressed similar views in March during an interview on Newsmax, citing the presumption that South American immigrants are members of criminal gangs. The St. Thomas More Law Center likewise promotes a radical anti-immigrant agenda, ostensibly in the name of the Catholic principle of national sovereignty.

At the core of all of these efforts is a thoroughly un-Christian fear and suspicion of those whose culture and language are different, disguised as a higher principle with reference to self-determination or, in a more vulgar fashion, the supposed danger of “invasion.” Vance has been able to deftly weave this with a simulacrum of concern for the poor, but mass deportation as a policy to provide affordable housing is about as sensible as using slavery to eradicate poverty. Moreover, such a utilitarian notion—that naked dishonesty about the supposed threat of foreign immigrants can be justified—is a perversion of the intellectual tradition Vance claims to have so much reverence for. It is easy, far too easy, to dehumanize a people when you think of them abstractly. It is White nationalism by another name.

It is impolitic to point to naked racism as the motivation behind such rhetoric, but there is nothing natural or inevitable about hating those who are different simply because they are different. The Catechism of the Catholic Church rightly links the Eighth Commandment, against bearing false witness, to virtues of justice and charity, as well as the exhortation by Jesus Christ to love one’s neighbor as themselves. The catechism goes so far as to call the act of bearing false witness an act of “real violence,” a particularly poignant formulation in light of the history this country has of racialized violence rooted in dishonesty. Racism is inherently rooted in this real violence, a grave error resulting from, like St. Thomas’ erroneous defense of slavery, the false assertion of the inferiority and dangerousness of the racial Other. 

The Rosewood Massacre and Emmett Till lynching are stark examples of this error in the American project, as is the very real danger Vance has placed the Springfield Haitians in.  To use moral abstractions to avoid grappling with political reality is folly, but to intentionally construct a false reality is a sin. 

 Jack Champagne is a jurist, educator, writer, and father.

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