Springfield Native John Legend Says Haitian Immigrants Are Not Eating Cats And Dogs
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During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump repeated a right-wing talking point that also happens to be an absolute lie: The idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing and eating people’s pets. That story appears to come from a viral and baseless Facebook post, and authorities in Springfield have repeatedly asserted that this is not the case. In the debate, when asked about those claims, Trump said, “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Since the debate, Trump and his running mate JD Vance have repeated those claims. Now, John Legend has jumped into the fray.
John Legend is a Springfield native and a longtime supporter of Democratic politicians. In a video posted on Instagram last night, Legend addressed Trump’s claims. He made a whole five-minute speech into his webcam, seemingly while wearingn a bathrobe. In those five minutes, he explained the conditions for Haiti’s influx of Haitian immigrants and got idealistic about the ideals of the American dream. Here’s what he said:
Springfield has had a large influx of Haitian immigrants who’ve come to our city. Now, our city had been shrinking for decades. We didn’t have enough jobs. We didn’t have enough opportunity. So people left and when somewhere else. So when I was there, we had upwards of 75,000 people and in the last five years, we were down to like 60,000 people. But of late, during the Biden administration, there have been more jobs that opened up — more manufacturing jobs, more plants, factories that needed employees and were ready to hire people.
So we had a lot of job opportunities, and we didn’t have enough people in our town of 60,000 people to fill those jobs. And during the same time, there have been upheaval and turmoil in Haiti, and the federal government granted visas and immigration status to a certain number of Haitian immigrants so they could come to our country legally. And our demand in Springfield for additional labor met up with the supply of additional Haitian immigrants, and here we are.
We had about 15,000 or so immigrants move to my town of 60,000. Now, you might say, “Wow, that’s a lot of people for a town that only had 60,000 before. That’s a 25% increase.” That is correct. So you might imagine there are some challenges with integrating a new population, new language, new culture, new dietary preferences, all kinds of reasons why there might be growing pains — making sure there are enough services to accommodate the new larger population that might need bilingual service providers, etc. So there are plenty of reasons why this might be a challenge for my hometown.
But the bottom line is these people came to my hometown because there were jobs for them and they were willing to work. They wanted to live the American dream, just like your German ancestors, your Irish ancestors, your Italian ancestors, your Jewish ancestors, your Jamaican ancestors, your Polish ancestors, all these ancestors who have moved to this country, maybe not speaking the language that everyone else spoke, maybe not eating the same foods, maybe having to adjust, maybe having to integrate, but all coming because they saw opportunity for themselves and their families in the American dream, and they came here to do that.
Some facts about immigrants: They usually do very well here. They are hard-working. They’re ambitious. They commit less crime than native-born Americans. And they will assimilate and integrate in time, but it takes time. So I think all of us need to have the same kind of grace that we would want our ancestors have when they moved here, with our Haitian brothers and sisters who moved here, too. And nobody’s eating cats. Nobody’s eating dogs. We all just want to live and flourish and raise our families in a healthy and safe environment.
How about we love one another? I grew up in the Christian tradition. They said to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and treat strangers as though they might be Christ. Sow how about we adopt that ethos when we talk about immigrants moving to our communities, and don’t spread hateful, xenophobic, racist lies about them.
