Lux Lucet

It is hard to express the outrage I felt at hearing this woman’s testimony.

I talked about her testimony on my podcast last night and couldn’t stop thinking about it this morning.  And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.  This is the exact kind of garbage that is going on all throughout the Western, formerly Christian world. Government officials are not only failing to do their most basic job – rewarding the good and punishing those who practice evil – but have become openly hostile to the very people who pay their salaries and whose best interests they are supposed to protect.

Another Springfield resident testified that “Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off, and eating them.”  Ah, the park. A beautiful and bucolic place to take your family for a nice, wholesome, relaxing time.  But not in Springfield, where you can witness ducks being decapitated for dinner by a bunch of foreigners. Newsflash! This is not how we do things in America. Maybe that’s how they roll in Haiti, but that’s just not in our repertoire here in Ohio. Diversity, it would seem, is not a strength.

Question: If a government fails to do its most basic job and instead actively tries to destroy the people it’s supposed to serve, is it still a legitimate government, or has it become a band of predators needing removal?

This is a question Western Christians increasingly are having to grapple with.

This brings us to the issue of the doctrine of the lesser magistrate.  Matt Trewhella has defined the doctrine of the lesser magistrate thus: “The lesser magistrate doctrine declares that when the superior or higher civil authority makes unjust/immoral laws or decrees, the lesser or lower ranking civil authority has both a right and a duty to refuse obedience to that superior authority. If necessary, the lesser authorities even have the right and obligation to actively resist the superior authority.”[1]

Note well that the lesser magistrates have not only a right to refuse obedience to unjust and immoral laws and decrees and to resist them if necessary but also a duty to do so.

I don’t know firsthand what’s going on in Springfield. I know about the situation there only from reports I’ve seen online.  With that caveat, I will say it certainly appears that the Springfield City Commission has utterly failed at exercising the doctrine of the lesser magistrate. These sorts of mass resettlements tend not to start at the local level.  They tend to begin at the federal level. If so, the Springfield City Commission had not only a right but an actual duty to resist the mass resettlement of Haitians that has so transformed their city.  But it appears that this did not happen.

What is more, it may well be that the mass migrant invasion was encouraged by the local city government.  According to the New York Times, “Springfield crafted a strategic plan to attract business.  City leaders pitched the town’s affordability, its work force development programs and its location, smack-dab between Columbus and Dayton and accessible to two interstates.”[2]

I will never criticize a city for trying to attract business and industry. I have only praise for this in the abstract. But there’s a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things.  Question: Were there no unemployed or underemployed Americans, Springfield natives, or people from other parts of the country who could fill these jobs? 

The Times story, as well as one on NPR, suggest there was a worker shortage, and this is the reason the Haitians had to be brought in.  However, I recall reading economist Walter Williams many years ago dismissing the notion of shortages. If I remember his argument correctly, he said there was no such thing as a shortage, only the absence of a market clearing price.  Put in more familiar terms, Williams argued that what people called a shortage was simply a case where the price of a good or service was not high enough to incentivize more supply to come onto the market.  If the local labor supply in Springfield was inadequate for the new businesses opening up, the businesses should have offered increased pay to incentivize more workers to apply.  Maybe they even could have recruited labor from other parts of the U.S.  Instead, they decided to import labor from Haiti without regard for the serious social problems it would create.

The damage to America doesn’t stop with innocent Americans being driven from their homes by mobs of foreigners who have no business being the country in the first place. There is enormous economic damage as well.  I mentioned the certain destruction of property values that must occur in situations such as what’s going on in Springfield.  But it runs deeper than that.

According to the New York Times, “Jobs attracted thousands of Haitians to Springfield, and employers were ecstatic.”[3] An NPR story takes a similar stance,[4] reporting that the Haitians were filling jobs in Ohio where there were “not enough workers.” This is one of the oldest canards in the mass immigration playbook, that there are all these jobs that Americans will not do.

But allow me to suggest an alternate explanation to the claim that there just aren’t enough American workers available.  It’s not that there is insufficient American labor to do these jobs, it’s that employers would rather import a labor force that’s cheaper than if they hired Americans, so they can pocket the profits of suppressed wages while fobbing off the attendant social costs of the Haitians on the taxpayers. The term for this sort of thing is privatizing the profits while socializing the costs. This is not free enterprise. It is welfare for the wealthy. It is both unjust and immoral. And it needs to stop.

American blue-collar workers have been horribly treated over the past five decades.  Many of their jobs have been shipped overseas. This is the deindustrialization that we’ve heard so much about and is the reason states like Ohio have been called the “Rust Belt” for most of my life.  I’ve seen the effects of this myself all around me. And now, to compound the problem, jobs that have not been sent overseas are being taken by imported foreigners, some legally in the U.S. but mostly illegally. According to a recent article in ZeroHedge, “native-born US workers have lost 1.4 million jobs; over the same period foreign-born workers have gained 3 million jobs…In an absolute shocker of a data point, in the past month, the US added 634K foreign-born workers, while losing 1.325 million native-born workers…But it’s not just the past month, or two, or three…As regular readers know, the reason why suddenly we are bombarded with media pitches for why illegal immigrants are actually great for you, is that the US has not created a single job for native-born workers since July 2018! And in that interval, it has created 4.7 million jobs for immigrants, both legal and illegal.”[5]

As noted above, this is great for businesses that can hire on the cheap and force the taxpayer to foot the massive bill for all social costs attendant upon mass legal and illegal immigration, but it is not the free market.[6] And it is unjust.

There is more than can be said about the immigration disaster unfolding in Springfield.  Lord willing, I will continue on this topic next week.

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[1] Matthew J. Trewhella, The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates (North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), Kindle Location 137.

[2] “How an Ohio Town Landed in the Middle of the Immigration Debate” by Miriam Jordan, The New York Times, 9/3/2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/springfield-ohio-school-bus-crash-haiti-immigrants.html?unlocked_article_code=1.JE4.9odG.WBzU3AM8womB&smid=url-share, accessed 9/8/2024.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “How Springfield, Ohio, took center stage in the election immigration debate,” NPR, 8/12/2024, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5055784, accessed 9/8/2024.

[5] “Great Replacement Job Shock: 1.3 Million Native-Born Americans Just Lost Their Jobs, Replaced By 635,000 Immigrants” by Tyler Durden, ZeroHedge, 9/7/2024, https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/great-replacement-job-shock-13-million-native-born-americans-just-lost-their-jobs-replaced, accessed 9/8/2024.

[6] There are numerous recent articles about the extraordinary costs of immigration.  According to one estimate, “illegal immigrants cost each household about $1,000, adding up to more than $120 billion a year. Sources such as Newsweek hint that the true cost may be even higher, possibly reaching $150 billion annually, an amount shared by both federal and state governments. In all actuality, the financial impact could be much worse.” “Illegal Immigration Costs American Households Hundreds of Billions Annually” by Chadwick Hagan, The Epoch Times, 4/8/2024, https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/great-replacement-job-shock-13-million-native-born-americans-just-lost-their-jobs-replaced, accessed 9/8/2024.

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