When Migrants Arrive

Rarely do we hear about the facts on the ground. Rarely does the media report what is really happening in small American communities when large numbers of migrants are introduced. Rarely do we hear what happens in schools when migrant children suck up the time and attention of teachers, to the detriment of the other students. 

We do hear rumors about eating household pets, and then, once these stories are discredited, we are told that these poor migrants just want a better life. If you point out the threat that these migrants pose, for committing more than their fair share of crimes, you are a bigot. And no one wants to be a bigot.

Thus, we are grateful to the New York Post for offering a picture of life in Logansport, Indiana now that large number of migrants, many of them Haitian, have been resettled there. The Daily Mail also covers the same story.

The crisis impacts education. Too often we limit our criticism of the American educational establishment to the horrors visited on children by the teachers’ unions. Rarely do we care about the impact of adding large numbers of illiterate and innumerate children to classrooms.

The Post reports:

Another rough estimate, from Logansport Mayor Chris Martin, pegs the number of arrivals from the impoverished Caribbean country at 2,000 to 3,000 over the last four years.

What’s clear is that the number of Haitian immigrant students in the Logansport schools has increased 15-fold, from 14 in 2021 to 207 this year.

Baker said her 16-year-old daughter, Cheyanne, dropped out of the local high school because teachers seemingly had no time for the English-speaking pupils anymore.

“There were way too many kids and it seemed to her that since they didn’t speak the language, or didn’t understand what was going on, they were getting more attention,” Baker said.

“And so she and the other kids who grew up here who were having issues or struggling in certain things weren’t able to get the attention that they needed — the help they needed from the school,” she said.

As the former honor roll student’s grades began to slip, Cheyanne gave up on Logansport High School and enrolled in an online homeschool instead.

“You can’t just focus all your resources on one group of children and everybody else is falling behind,” the exasperated mom said.

“And you wonder why these kids are getting frustrated and dropping out of school and getting bad grades.”

Cheyanne expressed her own frustration with the migrants, many of them unaccompanied minors or young men — who are believed to have been drawn by the Tyson poultry plant in town.

“It’s like the teacher is so busy with them that no one else gets to learn anything, it feels like,” she shared.

And that’s not all, folks. We are not going to talk about crime statistics, because we have recently learned that they tend to be skewed. We will mention something that is more difficult to quantify, but that is just as bad. Local inhabitants feel constantly threatened by the new arrivals:

Baker even claims her teen daughter was verbally accosted by Haitian migrants as she walked to a local coffee shop.

“She was walking by herself and she was walking that way and two of them were going this way, she just kinda smiled at them as they walked by. They started yelling for her after they got past her. She turned around and she looked at them and they were like, ‘Come here! Come here!'” Baker said.

“She’s like, ‘No, no, no, I’m good.’ She started walking fast. They chased her. She had to run all the way down to the coffee shop,” the mom said. “She’s scared to go outside.”

And the migrants are overwhelming the hospital services:

Meanwhile, Cass County health officials have sounded the alarm that the rapid population growth of migrants from a country which provides little to no medical screening is burdening local emergency rooms.

“This surge has created a drastic climb in medical visits,” said Alter, the county health administrator.

“It has been necessary for the hospital, health department and express clinics to boost translation services in order to ensure that medical needs are understood.”

She said conditions the migrants were living under — sometimes cramming 20 to 25 individuals in the same living space — has seen communicable diseases like tuberculosis flourish.

Again, no one seems to care what is happening to these small communities. We will see how it impacts the upcoming election.

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