“For a Haitian family in Springfield, Ohio, the house on Chestnut Avenue represented their future in this country. They’re now wondering what can be salvaged,” a recent feature in the Washington Post described. The article — one of several of its kind — attempts to elicit empathy for hard-working, religious Haitian immigrants, trying to grasp their slice of the American dream. In that respect, the WaPo largely achieves its goal. The pro-immigration rhetoric, however, is not only about celebrating diligent émigrés — it’s about maligning the blue-collar Americans they’ve come to replace.
Burying the Lede About Immigrants
That diabolical motive hides behind the story of Fernande and Rocher Vital, an automotive plant worker and evangelical pastor, respectively. In 2024, they bought a “century-old Folk Victorian” in Springfield, Ohio — the same town that served as an epicenter of political rhetoric regarding Haitian immigrants in last year’s presidential election. With the surrounding anti-immigrant sentiments, the family contemplated leaving.
Yet some things about the Vitals’ story are buried deep in the piece. They are not true U.S. citizens — they came to America through a special U.S. program that gave Haitians temporary protected status (TPS). This permissive policy, covering roughly 1.1 million people from various countries toward the end of Biden’s term, should concern Americans.
Trump attempted to terminate TPS for Haiti during his first term but was blocked by a federal judge. An appeals court reversed that decision, but due to “injunctions and other rulings,” the protections remained intact, according to the National Immigration Forum. Biden redesignated Haiti for TPS through February 2026, but after winning on promises to secure the border, the current Trump administration once again planned to terminate the program in September of this year. This has unsurprisingly been met with more judicial pushback.
The Vitals arrived in the United States during Trump’s first term “and saved money through the Biden administration.” Another Haitian immigrant mentioned in the article enjoyed premium medical service in the United States and was “chipping away” at those medical bills. Again, that should raise eyebrows — how many non-U.S. citizens receive thousands of dollars in U.S. medical care and don’t pay for it?
The most arresting observation in the article, however, comes when the author compares immigrant laborers to those who are native-born.
“Business leaders in their reliably red county praised immigrants for reviving the local economy. Americans struggled to pass a drug test, one factory boss told a TV news crew. Not Haitians.”
In other words, native-born Americans are damaged goods, struggling with broken homes and substance abuse, and far from the ideal of a dependable laborer.
What the Left Really Thinks About Working-Class Americans
Undoubtedly, native-born, working-class Americans in all of their contemporary struggles can make for difficult employees. Vice President J.D. Vance’s own memoir offers a quite visceral example of that analysis, as does the viral 2019 documentary American Factory, describing a Chinese company’s attempts to revitalize an abandoned factory in a depressed town near Dayton, Ohio. What business owner, forced to choose between a native-born — perhaps even entitled drug addict — and a humble immigrant with a clean record, wouldn’t choose the one more likely to show up to work on time and competently fulfill an eight-hour shift?
Yet this calculus, however economically understandable, betrays a deep ignorance regarding how America got here. For decades, U.S. economic policies effectively privileged cheap foreign competitors over domestic industries, causing the offshoring of millions of industrial jobs to Asia and elsewhere.
The sexual revolution — manifested especially in the normalization of no-fault divorce — wreaked havoc on lower-income communities, whose social capital declined. An increasing number of children grew up in broken homes and suffered all manner of negative consequences — poor mental health, declining educational prospects, increased substance abuse — because of it. Opioids poured into these communities, and crime skyrocketed.
In the kind of republic the framers envisioned, this is a travesty of failed domestic policies, which are supposed to protect American families and laborers. Policymakers and industry leaders failed generations of working-class Americans — all for the sake of “more consumer freedom” and cheaper, foreign-made goods. In that republic, the nation would acknowledge and repent of the destruction of entire communities — ones that were integral to its rise as a superpower.
Instead, our elites in politics, the academy, and entertainment ridiculed blue-collar Americans as backward hicks and bigots, who deserved to be cast aside. We shame them for their sins and failures, when the very policies the elite class trumpeted as our collective future devastated the Rust Belt and Appalachia.
Yes, individuals are responsible for their bad decisions — to become addicts, to leave their spouses, to fail to keep a steady job. But this didn’t happen in a vacuum: These people’s economic and social safety net collapsed within a single generation.
The Left’s Own “Throw-Away Culture”
The celebration of recently-arrived, hard-working immigrants at the expense of troubled native-born Americans, quite poignantly demonstrates the left’s own tendency toward the often-called modern “throw-away culture” of convenience and replaceability. When it comes to energy, recycling, or “buying local,” the left unhesitatingly speaks the language of sustainability, community, and anti-consumerism. But when it comes to native-born working-class Americans, leftists have no problem denigrating their fellow citizens as “deplorables.” Immigrants, in contrast, “get the job done,” as the musical Hamilton declares.
Yet, immigrants did not build America (even if they played a critical role). Settlers did, as John Daniel Davidson’s recent Federalist article reminds us. Today, a pro-immigrant ideology seeks to repudiate that ancestry as inherently racist and colonialist and replace the past with newcomers who will keep goods and services cheap and strengthen liberal voting blocs.
This is reprehensible. Our fellow citizens are our neighbors — if not our very flesh and blood. If they are struggling to keep a job or stay sober, we should not cast them into the darkness but help them, pray for them, and uplift them. Civic friendship — and Christianity, if we still hold to it — demands we do better for an America that feels left behind. That course — which undoubtedly requires a massive shift in our national social and economic priorities — may not be as easy as welcoming in millions of immigrants grateful for a better life. But it’s the right thing to do, as Vice President Vance argued when he spoke of the ordo amoris, the “order of charity,” that prioritizes those closest to us. Indeed, it’s the American thing to do.