One More Time: Ohio Gov DeWine And The Haitians

Back in 2024, I had several posts on the problems that Haitians on temporary protected status were causing in Springfield, OH, including one on Gov DeWine's support for the program. In this post, I outlined how the mayor profited by renting apartments he owned to Haitians, and that he and DeWine appeared together in a press conference demanding that then-candidate Trump stop making "false allegations" against them. However, at least so far, there's no evidence that DeWine has profited personally from the program.

Nevertheless, in the wake of Thursday's Supreme Court ruling that allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Haitians, DeWine prominently disagreed, although he simply repeated the same 2024 talking points in the CNN interview embedded above:

It is not in the United States's interest, certainly not in Ohio's interest, to have people who are working every single day, who are supporting a family, who are buying houses, starting businesses, and then put deep roots in this country, and really are contributing, and yank them out. I mean, look at what the mayor of Springfield says, Mayor says that is a huge mistake.

Reporting from Springfield cited in the post says that the local Republican establishment benefited from the universal effect of migration: as in the UK and Canada, it drives down wages and drives up rents. In Springfield, it enabled sweatshop amployers and slumlords. NPR's Weekend Edition said as much:

SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: . . . Haitians have become an important part of the U.S. workforce. About 30% work in nursing homes as home health aides or delivering other kinds of care to seniors. Katie Smith Sloan, who represents thousands of senior care organizations, says it will leave a huge hole if those workers are forced to leave the country.

KATIE SMITH SLOAN: They are the backbone. And they are wonderful, wonderful workers that have developed deep, deep relationships with residents. It's just horrifying to think about what the world is going to be like for our members and for older adults and families without these workers.

HORSLEY: Smith Sloan says there have never been enough native-born workers willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages. If foreign-born workers are sent away, she says more of the caregiving responsibility will fall to family members or, in some cases, more costly hospital stays.

SMITH SLOAN: We'll see nursing homes closing beds, maybe closing down wings, maybe closing altogether, that just won't be able to accommodate as many people as they could in the past if they don't have a workforce.

That is, a workforce "willing to provide that kind of care, at least not at the existing wages."

Another question is Gov DeWine's apparent charitable ties to Haiti:

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's ties to Haiti stretch back 30 years to his first visit to the island nation while serving in the U.S. Senate.

The stop-over visit in 1995 spurred the Cedarville Republican to become an authority on Haiti and to make more than 20 return visits.

On a 1998 trip to Cite Soleil, a slum of Port-au-Prince, Mike and Fran DeWine met Tom Hagan, a Catholic priest who operated a free school.

The DeWines began underwriting Hagan's mission and in 1999 the schools were named in honor of Becky DeWine, their daughter who was killed in a 1993 auto accident at age 22. Becky, who had just graduated college, had planned a career in journalism.

In the past five years, the DeWine Family Foundation Inc. has donated more than $2 million to Hands Together, the non-profit that operates the free schools in Haiti.

Hands Together grew its operations from four classrooms in 1998 to 34 schools on seven campuses across six neighborhoods, serving nearly 6,000 students.

What's puzzling is that, with all the aid and NGO money that goes into Haiti, nothing has changed there, something DeWine himself understands clearly:

"The situation in Haiti is as bad as it's ever been, probably worse than it usually has been," DeWine told the statehouse news bureau. "You have gangs that run most of the country. You have a dysfunctional police, you have a dysfunctional government. The economy is in dire straits. It's a very dangerous country."

So why just do the same-old-same-old? There seems to be some DeWine connection with wealth and traditional philanthropy: his net worth is estimated at $37 million, most of it from inheriting the family business, The DeWine Seeds & Ohio Twine Co. The misplaced benevolence of the very wealthy seems often to increase the net misery in the world -- we need to learn more about how these figures operate.