How an Ohio Town Landed in the Middle of the Immigration Debate

Jobs attracted thousands of Haitians to Springfield, and employers were ecstatic. But then an immigrant driver was involved in a fatal school bus crash. And JD Vance entered the fray.

It has been more than a year since the fateful morning last August when, outside Springfield in southwestern Ohio, a minivan veered into oncoming traffic and rammed into a school bus on the first day of class, killing an 11-year-old boy and injuring 23 other children.

Soon, it emerged that the driver of the minivan was not a longtime resident but one of the thousands of immigrants from Haiti who had recently settled in the area. He was driving with a foreign license not valid in Ohio.

The stage was set for another fraught chapter in the debate over immigration in America, this one magnified because JD Vance, the state’s junior senator, would soon become the Republican vice-presidential nominee.

Haitians were new to the region. During the last census, in 2020, a little more than 58,000 people lived in Springfield, a town at the crossroads of America that had fallen on hard times and shed population as opportunity slipped away. But it has changed dramatically in recent years, as a boom in manufacturing and warehouse jobs attracted a swelling wave of immigrants, mainly from Haiti. City officials estimate that as many as 20,000 Haitians have arrived, most of them since the pandemic.

At the first City Commission meeting after the bus crash, angry residents packed the chambers and demanded answers.

“How do you know we aren’t getting criminals, rapists?” a man in a blue Harley Davidson T-shirt asked. “Who can stop them from coming here?” someone else wanted to know. Had they been screened? Were they going to use their driver’s licenses to vote?