Like so many midwestern manufacturing-centric communities, Lima, Ohio, has dealt with slow-motion decline for decades. Famed for producing oil in the late 1800s and the Abrams army tank, its population has been on the wane since the 1970s.
But in recent years, the city has experienced a small turnaround.
A Procter & Gamble chemical plant east of the city has recently undergone a $500m expansion, adding more than 100 new jobs. Part of the chemical giant’s expansion has seen it donate tens of thousands of dollars in college scholarships to local students and millions of dollars to local road projects.
One 2024 real estate report suggested Lima was one of the hottest property markets in the country for young people.
That’s despite states such as Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, once the heart of industrial America, finding themselves fighting a shrinking homegrown population.
Immigrants from Haiti such as Amos Mercelin, who is one of several thousand people from the devastated Caribbean country now living in the Lima area, have stepped in to fill the labor shortage.
“I worked first at a plastics factory, then I did 12-hour shifts at a Fedex [warehouse]. Now I work with a healthcare organization,” he says.
“It was hard, but I knew these were just first steps.” Many Haitians, he says, work at food production plants scattered around the area, where cold temperatures and harsh physical conditions are a part of the job.
But come August, when temporary protected status (TPS) for more than half a million Haitians is set to end following an announcement by the Department of Homeland Security on 20 February, that growth could be jeopardized. For Mercelin, thousands of other Haitians and the businesses that depend on them, that could be catastrophic.
Cities such as Lima and Haitians such as Mercelin aren’t alone.
In a part of the country hit hard in the aftermath of the Great Recession, about 1,000 Haitians are believed to live in the Findlay area, a city 30 miles north-east of Lima, where one automotive company reportedly relies on immigrants for half its workforce.
Ninety miles to the south, in Springfield, about 15,000 Haitians have contributed to the city’s housing and financial revival. While the city’s property tax revenue was less than $800m in 2018, in 2023, it reached $1bn for the first time. Last year, it grew again, by 40%. While the property tax revenue increase has in part been fueled by rising property valuations, it also coincides with the growth in the number of tax-paying Haitians.
The Trump administration’s move to end TPS has led to worry among city officials in Springfield.
“They have strengthened our local economy by filling key roles in manufacturing and healthcare, even as their rapid arrival has strained public services and housing,” Springfield’s mayor, Rob Rue, a Republican, said in a statement.
“I firmly believe in protecting our borders and reforming our immigration policies. Hasty changes and swift deportation will cause hardworking immigrants to be lost, negatively impacting our economy.”
In Lima, where Haitians have been blamed by some for rising rents and housing shortages, some are expressing similar concerns.
“I’m worried for our workforces if there should be a mass exodus [of Haitian immigrants] because some of our plants and factories need them,” says Carla Thompson, a city council representative.
“People are making money from renting to them, providing services, employing them. All of that is going to go away and those were jobs that our plants and factories needed filled. If we go back to the same population that we had, how do those jobs get filled in the future?”
Voicemails and emails sent to several businesses in Lima, Springfield and Dayton – areas with broadly high levels of support for Donald Trump – known to employ Haitian immigrants were not responded to or comment was declined on whether they would be affected by the end of TPS for Haitians.
after newsletter promotion
A representative of a Springfield-based company that employed Haitian workers and whose owner faced death threats last fall at the height of the Trump-induced anti-immigrant controversy said its leadership had stopped taking media requests.
For Thompson in Lima, it’s not only businesses that could lose out if Haitians are forced to leave the country in August.
“I know the landlords have been loving it because I haven’t heard any complaints about [Haitians] not paying rent,” she says.
While larger midwestern cities such as Columbus, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh have mostly weathered the long-term regional population decline and the 2008 Great Recession that followed, smaller cities such as Lima, Springfield and Dayton have struggled.
Residents say that’s why the influx of immigrant communities in recent years seeking a low cost of living and plentiful job opportunities have played such an important economic role.
Thompson says she got word from the mayor of Findlay that crime in areas that Haitians had moved to had fallen. But she believes there is a racist undertone to the plan to end the TPS program for Haitians, which the Department for Homeland Security claims “has been exploited and abused” for decades.
“The backlash against this group has been ridiculous and there’s no way in my mind that it’s not connected to the fact that they are brown-skinned,” she says.
“Racism has been an issue. Some people are probably excited that TPS is being stopped.”
For Mercelin, who has been in Lima for a year, the prospect of the end of TPS is disastrous.
“Some Haitians are talking about applying for asylum to help them stay here, but I can’t,” he says. “I have a daughter in Haiti and if I apply for asylum, it means I can’t go back there for something like seven years.
“That’s something I just cannot do.”
