As van loads of Haitian migrants began arriving over the summer, residents in Alabama started to wonder whether their already-swelling community could handle the influx.
Not satisfied with the answers they were getting from local officials, Jarrod and Amanda Schulte started investigating for themselves. They soon found themselves walking around north Athens, a run-down part of the city where migrants from all over the world live in dilapidated homes.
“What we found was not very pretty,” Jarrod Schulte told The Daily Wire. “The city of Athens, our politicians, they all need to do better.”
The Schultes and others in Alabama worry that their cities will become the next Springfield, Ohio, where a large influx of Haitian migrants was accompanied by a surge in crime and traffic accidents. Springfield made national headlines after former President Donald Trump mentioned the city during the September presidential debate, during a discussion of the impacts of mass migration on small cities across the country, not just in border states. Similar problems have arisen in Pennsylvania and Indiana, where residents worry their small cities don’t have enough resources to handle the influx.
The Daily Wire traveled to Athens and spoke to more than a dozen current residents, consisting of both longtime residents and migrants. The concern is not only that migrants are impacting the lives of those who were already there, straining already scarce resources in the town, but also the lives that migrants lead upon arrival.
Pierre-Marc, a 44-year-old Haitian migrant in Athens whom the Schultes befriended, is currently living alongside four other Haitian adults and two children in a rundown home in north Athens.
When Pierre-Marc first met the Schultes, the facade of his home was covered in peeling paint and dotted with cracked windows. There was no furniture in the home, and residents washed their clothes in the sink they shared.
Hellbound and Down 