The bare facts of the Springfield story are enough to explain our political moment; they are ignored at peril.
Before the man-bites-dog stories coming out of Springfield, Ohio, the most fact-checked claim by a Republican presidential candidate was Ronald Reagan and the “welfare queen.”
To this day decried as a vile and racist myth illustrative of the conservative movement’s nefarious motives, the woman who was the basis of many of Reagan’s anecdotes did exist and she did commit welfare fraud, which might have been the least of her crimes, even if some of the details were embellished in political speeches. NPR’s “All Things Considered” devoted a 2013 story to the “truth behind the lies,” which, if the network’s ideological commitments were different, might have gone down in history with “alternative facts.”
More importantly, by the 1990s there was a bipartisan consensus that the welfare system was incentivizing bad behavior, often to the detriment of the people it was intended to help, and needed reform. In Massachusetts, this was partially driven by the Boston Globe’s reporting on Claribel Ventura, a successor of sorts to Linda Taylor. While there remain prominent dissenters against that consensus even today, relatively few people want to go back to welfare as we knew it.
Perhaps a similar consensus reimagining immigration will someday take hold. Briefly, at a similar point in the 1990s, it nearly did before being unraveled by a different bipartisan coalition of big business, labor, and government.
That doesn’t mean there will be future documentaries about the real cat consumers of Clark County. The former President Donald Trump is a more prolific apocryphal tale-wagger than Reagan. One need not accept at face value every urban legend being circulated on the internet to see that the situation in Springfield is suboptimal and created by highly debatable policy choices.
My colleague Tiana Lowe Doescher did a deep dive following the money in Springfield, outlining many practices that would not be described as progressive in any other context. “One man with a long relationship with the city government is being paid by migrants to house them in properties he owns and to drive them in vans he owns to jobs for wages that can be artificially lower than the market because federal taxpayers are subsidizing their healthcare and grocery budgets,” she writes.
Sometimes, no politically expedient embellishment is required. The reality is troubling enough.
Why is a relatively small, heavily working-class community being asked to bear these costs, a fraction of which would elicit a full-scale freakout in places like Martha’s Vineyard and New York City? “The migrant crisis did not ‘destroy’ New York,” reads a New York Times headline that belongs in the hall of fame beside the one mentioned earlier from NPR. “But challenges remain.”
The Gray Lady goes on to quote “advocates” who want city officials to treat the situation as “an opportunity rather than a catastrophe.” What about what the voters in the receiving city want?
Dumb and ugly things are often said about race in connection with issues like welfare, crime, immigration, and affirmative action. They should not be. Political leaders who traffic in such rhetoric often do real damage both to their causes and the country at large. The same can be said of those who spread falsehoods, which is wrong in principle and in practice also serves to discredit the problems they wish to draw attention to in the eyes of an unsympathetic media.
But part of the reason Democrats lost their grip on national political power is they too often refused to deal with real problems associated with welfare, crime, and affirmative action, dismissing genuine popular desires for fairness and safety as racist backlash. By, again, the 1990s, that sentiment made New York City ready to elect Rudy Giuliani. The same is now happening with immigration and related issues.
Immigration has always conferred benefits as well as costs. Wealthy countries should within reason afford generosity to immigrants, refugees, and legitimate asylum-seekers. But progressives are ordinarily quick to argue that America’s wealth is not shared equally among all its citizens and that what’s good for corporations isn’t always beneficial to workers. When it comes to immigration (or green-energy subsidies), suddenly they transform from Norma Rae into 1950s Eisenhower Republicans proclaiming that what’s good for General Motors is necessarily good for America.
Communities that are spread thin deserve responsible, non-demagogic political leaders who are responsive to their needs and concerns. But, as they say, challenges remain.
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