John Legend read off a script on Thursday encouraging Springfield, Ohio locals to embrace having 15,000 Haitians dumped in their community.
He made the comments in a video for Instagram filmed inside his mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
Legend, who was born in Springfield, kept telling locals to embrace the Haitians coming to "our" town even though he's living over 2,000 miles away on the opposite side of the country in a town that's 82% white and only 2.2% black.
NEW: Actor John Legend tells the people of Springfield, Ohio to love their Haitian neighbor because it’s the Christian thing to do.
The actor with a net worth of $100M has come out in defense of the Haitians moving to his hometown.
The Columbus Dispatch carried his statement (likely written by some PR firm) as an article on their website on Thursday.
Here's the transcript:
My name is John Legend, and I was born as John. R Stevens from a place called Springfield, Ohio. Springfield, Ohio — you may have heard of Springfield, Ohio, this week.
In fact, if you watch the debate, we were discussed by our presidential candidates, including a very special, interesting man named Donald J. Trump.
Now, Springfield has had a large influx of Haitian immigrants who come to our city.
Now, our city had been shrinking for decades. We didn't have enough jobs. We didn't have enough opportunity so people left and went somewhere else.
So, 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.
But of late, during the Biden administration, there have been more jobs that opened up. More manufacturing jobs, more plants, factories that needed employees and were ready to hire people.
So, we had a lot of job opportunities, and we didn't have enough people in our town of 60,000 people to fill those jobs.
And during the same time, there has been upheaval and turmoil in Haiti. The federal government granted visas and immigration status to a certain number of Haitian immigrants so they could come to our country legally.
Our demand in Springfield for additional labor met up with the supply of additional Haitian immigrants and here we are.
We had about 15,000 or so immigrants move to my town of 60,000. You might say, wow, that's a lot of people for a town that only had 60,000 before. That's a 25% increase.
That is correct.
So you might imagine there are some challenges with integrating a new population.
New language, new culture, new dietary preferences. All kinds of reasons why there might be growing pains.
Making sure there are enough services to accommodate the new, larger population that might need bilingual service providers, etc. etc.
So, there are plenty of reasons why this might be a challenge for my hometown.
But the bottom line is these people came to Springfield because there were jobs for them and they were willing to work.
They wanted to live the American dream, just like your German ancestors, your Irish ancestors, your Italian ancestors, your Jewish ancestors. Your Jamaican ancestors, your Polish ancestors - all these ancestors who moved to this country.
Maybe not speaking the language that everyone else spoke.
Maybe not eating the same foods.
Maybe having to adjust.
Maybe having to integrate.
But all coming because they saw opportunity for themselves and their families in the American dream.
And they came here to do that.
Some facts about immigrants. They usually do very well here.
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. So I think all of us need to have the same kind of grace that we would want our ancestors to have when they moved here with our Haitian brothers and sisters.
Nobody's eating cats.
Nobody's eating dogs.
We all just want to live and flourish and raise our families in a healthy and safe environment.
How about we love one another? 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.
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.
John R. Stevens from Springfield signing off.
Why don't you take these Haitians into your Beverly Hills mansion?
You could easily fit a few hundred in there.
Note too how he doesn't even say he's Christian -- he just says you believe that stuff so you should do what I think your religion tells you. He hasn't taken in any of these Haitians despite having enormous means.
Nathan Clark got rewarded bigly w/ puff pieces on all the biggest media sites for saying he wishes his son Aiden "was killed by a 60-year-old white man instead" of a Haitian migrant.
This is clearly part of a demoralization campaign. This is the same type of rhetoric that'd be blasted over the hijacked airwaves by an invading army but even more self-righteous and comically hypocritical.
Haiti needs people like John Legend to go back to their country and help their community. If they're better than us in every way and commit less crimes they should have no problem building a first world country!
John Legend read off a script on Thursday encouraging Springfield, Ohio locals to embrace having 15,000 Haitians dumped in their community.