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When Daniel Cárdenas from Coahuila, Mexico, first arrived in Middletown, a post-industrial city of 50,000 people in south-west Ohio, he was immediately enamored.
“It’s a small town with friendly people. You have shops, big stores; there’s no traffic,” he says.
“I really fell in love with Middletown. It’s awesome.”
A pastor at the First United Methodist Church since 2022, Cárdenas is one of a growing number of immigrants from Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Honduras who have moved to the hometown of Vice-President JD Vance in recent years. And while Vance has been at the forefront of anti-immigrant rhetoric in the US, the story of immigration’s impact on Middletown is one of rebirth and success.
Dominated for decades by a huge steel plant on the south side of town, Middletown has felt the effects of the decline of American manufacturing more than most. A 2006 lockout at the steel plant that lasted for more than a year saw AK Steel lay off nearly a thousand workers. The ramifications of the Great Recession that followed in 2008 can still be felt, fueling a population decline of more than 10% between 2010 and 2020.
But today, the city is bouncing back, with immigrants such as Cárdenas playing a central role. Nearly all of its population growth since 2010 can be attributed to its foreign-born population, which stands at more than 2,000 people.
Its Hispanic communities have helped turn Middletown into one of the few regional cities in the state with a growing population. Homes and commercial spaces on the city’s south side have been revitalized, creating new sources of property and income tax revenue for city authorities. Mexican food trucks dot the city’s street corners and Spanish chatter fills its local chain restaurants.
In November, Middletown’s mayor, Elizabeth Slamka, was elected without having any political experience, and is the daughter of an immigrant mother from Colombia.
“After the pandemic, everything was closed,” says Cárdenas. “And now we are having a kind of boost in our community, and the Hispanic communities are helping with that.” Many, he says, work in construction and landscaping jobs – industries that have suffered chronic staffing shortages since the pandemic and which represent a wider midwestern trend.
The midwest is set to be one of the regions most affected by population decline in the decades ahead. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan currently make up four of the 10 most populus states in the country, but all four are expected to experience population decline by 2050.
Shrinking populations for communities in the industrial midwest mean fewer resources for infrastructure, maintenance and other basic needs.
Vance, however, has made criticizing immigrants a central theme of his political career.
Since before his election win last November, he has claimed immigrants undercut American workers, and in recent weeks has claimed that uncontrolled immigration is the “greatest threat” to the US.
And he’s not alone.
For decades Middletown’s Butler county sheriff Richard Jones, who sports a Stetson hat, has been known for taking an anti-immigrant stance. The same week Donald Trump was re-elected to the White House, Jones installed a sign outside the county jail that reads: ‘illegal aliens here.’ Recently Jones, who has had a grip on the sheriff’s office for more than 20 years, began renting out jail cells to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency at a rate of $68 per person a day and $36 an hour for transportation, or in his own words for “as much as I can get”.
This month, the sheriff’s office and a city neighboring Middletown were ordered to pay a $1.2m settlement for the wrongful detention of around 500 people over a two-year period beginning in 2017.
The anti-immigrant rhetoric from Vance, Jones and President Trump has hit home.
After mass, some people have approached Cárdenas expressing fear of Ice raids, following one such incident that saw two people detained 20 miles north of Middletown just days after Trump took office in January.
“People are saying they are seeing undercover police cars; people are afraid, they don’t know what to believe; there are a lot of rumors,” he says. “In my sermons, I try to give some hope.”
Two years ago, Alexandra Gomez established the Latinos Unidos de Middletown Ohio organization to serve as a venue for Latino immigrants to find education, housing and employment resources. “At our first festival in 2023 we had about 1,500 to 2,000 people,” she says.
But statements from the new administration in recent weeks have fueled concern.
“It was real here; people were scared, they did not want to go out. They were afraid to go to work,” she says.
“And it isn’t that people were afraid that Ice would show up [at their gatherings] but that someone who felt the right to be rude shows up. The biggest concerns people have are: ‘How do I go to work?’”
One of the biggest effects of the recent rise in immigration has been seen in the city’s schools.
Over the last 15 years, the number of students taking English language classes has more than doubled. Today, nearly one-in-five students are Hispanic or Latino, their presence helping to keep the wider school system funded and operating. The winner of last year’s Middletown Community Foundation’s volunteer of the year award was a high school teacher originally from Colombia.
Gomez and Cárdenas say a source of comfort for immigrants has come from a surprising source: the local police force.
Cárdenas says his and other churches recently had a meeting with the city police force and was told that it wouldn’t be working with Ice to request visa documents or detain suspected illegal immigrants. “They said: ‘We are not going to profile anybody; we are just going to do our job.’”
That was echoed by Gomez.
“They reached out to us and basically said: ‘We’ve got other things to do. It’s not our job to be chasing paperwork.’”
Such has been the growth in Middletown – around three-fourths of the city’s foreign-born population are from Latin American countries, according to the US Census Bureau –, that Roberto Vargas from Guadalajara, Mexico, saw on opportunity to open the Cancun Mexican restaurant on the city’s eastern edge in December 2023.
“I have good people working for me; I haven’t heard anyone have issues with [deportations or Ice activity],” he says.
For him, it’s the state of the economy that is the major concern.
“Restaurants all over the place are closing down. It’s scary,” he says. Since Trump took office, the US economy has been on unsteady ground, with the stock market losing 7% of its value.
“I don’t know what’s going on.”
