@Mike is a good guy and isn't xenophobic. The man has been through some shit and has real world experience. He ain't dumb.
Being wary of
how immigrants are used and of capitalists isn't the same as being anti-immigration/xenophobic/racist.
I think the way immigrants are used by rightists is as a scapegoat to get people who are hurt by rightist policies supporting rightists electorally. And that's exactly what Mike has been doing. I also think his inability to think on his feet and insistence on canned talking points in the face of contrary facts suggests a deeper issue.
There's arguments - leftwing arguments no less - that can and have been made about the use of and exploitation of immigrants including their (unwitting) use to undermine native-born US labor. My historical knowledge of such isn't strong enough to really dig in about other than that I've a passing awareness of it. And that's never mind about how the third world is used and abused by capitalists which is well known. That doesn't mean that immigration is a negative nor that immigrants don't expand the economy; they do. Bernie Sanders has laid all this out over the years.
I don't think they're really left-wing arguments. I think that because of the Cold War, a lot of rightists tried to justify support for hierarchy in capitalist terms, but well-functioning markets tend to dissolve hierarchies (even Marx noted that profits tend toward zero--though he noted counteracting factors, including one that can sort of be tied to the rightist view here). Since the end of the Cold War, rightists have become increasingly anti-markets, and supporters of markets have moved to the left (also affected by an empirical revolution in the study of economics).
At any rate, the arguments can be evaluated on their own terms, separate from the preferences of people looking at them, and it is simply not true that an influx of immigration--even low-skill immigration--causes native wages to fall. There isn't good theory backing it up, and the evidence contradicts it. That's why I keep pointing out, and
@Mike keeps avoiding, the fact that during the period of an increase in the Haitian population, wages in Springfield rose more than average for the country. I do not understand how that fact is not the end of the discussion. His theory is that the numbers are way higher than any known facts show (we have estimates of 12K-15K total immigrants in the entire county, while he's insisting that it's 20K Haitian immigrants just in one small-ish town), and that those high numbers are causing wages to fall, and that the falling wages are an engineered effect of shadowy, evil figures. But if the numbers can be that high and the town's wages are rising, the impact would either have to be positive or so small that some mysterious other factor is totally swamping them (and I think we'd really want to know what that factor is!).
I don't know the situation in Ohio with regard to this thread nor the overall discussion as of late (other than that the dogs and cats thing is bullshit). I abhor all the racist and xenophobic shit said about the Haitian immigrants. That said, I immediately got suspicious when that business owner complimented them while putting down the native born local US population (obviously not relating to the OP). It reads as, "nO oNe WAntS tO wOrK AnYmoRe!" Maybe he and other local businesses pay a fair wage and everything is dandy, maybe not. My eyes narrowed and brow furrowed when I heard that though. If all's improving in the community which seems to be the case, coolio. The business owner mentioned locals being on drugs too and that's another thing where I go, "okay, but why? What happened there?" If wages are fine, why are people leaving?
To be clear, wages are low, but they were low before, and now they're rising. The problem is death spirals. An economic downturn causes people to leave, which causes the economy to get worse for people who stay, which incentivizes them to leave, etc. The influx of immigration is saving the town, and of course local business owners would be happy about it.