Ohio Governor Mike DeWine has written a remarkable piece in The New York Times taking Donald Trump and J.D. Vance to task for their demagoguery about the Haitian influx into Springfield, a small city in the western part of the state. This is striking—it’s rare for a governor to criticize the top of his party’s ticket quite this publicly.

But DeWine’s piece is worth dwelling on for another reason: It lays bare an essential truth about the Springfield controversy, and why the MAGA movement has seized on it so fervently. For Trump and key elements of MAGA, Springfield is not really about border security, or the proper pace of legal immigration, or how best to assimilate new arrivals. Rather, it’s a stand-in for a subterranean argument about the desirable ethnoracial makeup of the American population.

In his piece, DeWine, a Republican, defends the decision to allow thousands of Haitians to move to this city of 60,000 people. He recaps arguments you’ve heard: The city badly needed workers, and Haitians are there legally to work. Many residents have welcomed the newcomers. Haitians have revitalized another Rust Belt city coping with postindustrial population decline.

DeWine also indicts Trump and Vance in surprisingly harsh terms for a Republican. “I am saddened by how they and others continue to repeat claims that lack evidence and disparage the legal migrants living in Springfield,” he writes, noting that their behavior “hurts the city and its people.” But another passage from DeWine merits attention:

The Biden administration’s failure to control the southern border is a very important issue that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance are talking about and one that the American people are rightfully deeply concerned about. But their verbal attacks against these Haitians—who are legally present in the United States—dilute and cloud what should be a winning argument about the border.

There’s something quaint in DeWine’s assumption that this might move Trump and Vance. They may be right to draw attention to the Biden administration’s border mismanagement, DeWine suggests, but in attacking Haitians so viciously, they are allowing that argument to be tainted by intimations of cruelty and racism,........

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