Pop star John Legend has urged those in his home city of Springfield, Ohio, to embrace the many “challenges” of a huge “influx of Haitian immigrants” — while insisting that local pets are safe from ending up on dinner tables.
“You may have heard of Springfield, Ohio, this week,” Legend, 45, said in a lengthy Instagram video on Thursday, noting how his hometown had been “discussed by our presidential candidates” at the previous night’s debate.
“Nobody’s eating cats. Nobody’s eating dogs,” the two-time Emmy Award-winning singer insisted, bluntly dismissing the now-viral claims shared by former President Donald Trump.
“How about we love another?” he asked, calling himself by his real name, “John R. Stevens from Springfield.”
The “All of Me” pop star said that although his native city has had an “influx of Haitian immigrants,” it came after Springfield’s population had been “shrinking for decades.”
“We didn’t have enough opportunity, so people left and went somewhere else,” said Legend, who changed his Instagram handle to show he was from Springfield despite moving away years ago.
“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,” he said.
The Haitians who “came to our country legally” helped fill those jobs, he said — while acknowledging the “challenges” of newly arrived migrants marking a “25% increase” in his hometown’s population.
Those “growing pains” for Springfield included an influx of people with “new language, new culture” — and “new dietary preferences,” Legend said.
“So there are plenty of reasons why this might be a challenge for my hometown,” he added, likening it to immigrants who for decades have come chasing “the American dream.”
“I think all of us need to have the same kind of grace that we would want [for] our ancestors” with “our Haitian brothers and sisters.”
Legend also presented his followers with “some facts about immigrants.”
“They usually do very well here,” Legend said. “They are hard-working. They are ambitious. They commit less crime than native-born Americans, and they will assimilate and integrate in time, but it takes time.”
“I grew up in the Christian tradition. We said to love our neighbor as we love ourselves and treat strangers as though they might be Christ,” Legend said.
“So, 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,” he finished the lecture, signing off the video as “John R. Stevens from Springfield.”
The claims about Haitian migrants eating pets became amplified earlier this week when Trump took to the presidential debate stage and declared that migrants in Springfield had been abducting them for consumption.
“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” the Republican nominee said.
Debate moderators quickly fact-checked him and pointed out that city officials have said the claims are untrue.
In an interview with NewsNation anchor Chris Cuomo, the mayor of Springfield, Rob Rue, shot down the claims the former president made about Haitian migrants in his city.
“Springfield is still beautiful and your pets are safe in Springfield, Ohio, safe,” Rue told the former CNN anchor.
“So what this is, what this has done is created a negative light, obviously, that we did not look for, we did not ask for these.”
Rue shared that the city had no control over the migrants coming, but that rumors of their alleged bizarre behavior are “frustrating.”
“These claims are, they were just untrue. And we may mention that there we’ve just don’t see reports of those. There’s a lot of frenzy on the internet, but this is not what we’re seeing. It’s a bit frustrating.”
Rue also backed up claims Legend made that the city has added more jobs, which attracted the Haitian migrants to the Ohio city.
“We were in an economic decline for a long time, and over the last 10 years, we’ve seen about 8,000 jobs come to our community,” Rue shared.
“There’s a lot of good things happening in Springfield.”
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