When large numbers of migrants, seeking an escape from poverty and dangerous conditions back home, began arriving in a small industrial city in southern Ohio a while back, they brought with them their own set of peculiar beliefs concerning pets.
“They hated domesticated animals and had little use for ‘critters’ that weren’t for eating,” one former resident would later write of the newcomers. The author recounted the story of a migrant who had threatened to feed a relative’s pet steak laced with antifreeze. It was strongly implied that the same man had previously murdered a neighbor’s dog. Local authorities fielded complaints about yet another migrant who kept slaughtering chickens in his backyard and carving them up, right on the spot.
All of this might be an accepted part of the culture where those migrants came from, but to “the established middle class of white Ohioans,” the author argued, the new arrivals “simply didn’t belong.” They had too many children, and they kept bringing even more people with them—many of them needing jobs and housing—as part of an extended chain migration. “[M]any parts of their culture and customs met with roaring disapproval,” the author wrote. The analysis fixated on the “racialness” of the newcomers, who, in the eyes of townies, had brought to the Midwest the habits of Black people from the Deep South.
The author, you may have guessed, was Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, and the influx of migrants who threatened hallowed Midwestern values were his relatives. It was his Papaw, James Vance, the senator recounted in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, whose belligerence preceded the untimely passing of a neighbor’s dog. The elder Vance had arrived in Kentucky as a teenager from Eastern Kentucky, where, in his grandson’s account, he faced the possibility of prosecution for his “affair” with a 13-year-old girl (Vance’s Mamaw) and of retribution from her family.
Vance, who in recent weeks has falsely smeared Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, as a group of cat-abducting “illegal aliens” straining resources and threatening the health and safety of the community, told a different kind of migration story in his book. The outsiders who were drawn to the area by its surplus of industrial jobs, though foreign in their ways, were not “villains,” he wrote: “They were just a ragtag band of hillbillies struggling to find their way.”
Hillbilly, which chronicles Vance’s tumultuous upbringing in the southern Ohio city of Middletown, where he lived off and on with a mother who suffered from drug addiction, and his elderly Mamaw, made Vance a star when it was published in 2016. As Vance has inched to within a coin toss of the vice presidency, and undergone a political evolution from center-right Trump critic to MAGA warrior, the book and its characters have continued to feature prominently in his message. At his Republican National Convention address in July, Vance pointed to the story of his family, and its ancestral cemetery in Kentucky, as evidence that the United States is “not just an idea,” but a “homeland” for his people.
“The notion of being separated from everyone and everything I loved was terrifying,” Vance wrote in Hillbilly, explaining why he had once covered for his mother’s behavior. “So I shut my mouth, told the social workers everything was fine, and hoped that I wouldn’t lose my family when the court hearing came.” One of the book’s only real policy prescriptions was to roll back regulations on foster-care, so that people without formal accreditation—like his Mamaw—could more easily assume guardianship in complicated family situations.
But at the vice presidential debate on Tuesday, Vance used the now-familiar story of his mother’s drug use, which did compel her to live apart from her children for long periods, as justification for a mass deportation program that could separate children from their parents. “I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean,” Vance said at Tuesday’s vice presidential debate. “I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”
And he offered a defense of his attacks on Haitians with legal status who were drawn to Ohio by work and community—like the Vances long ago—and planted their roots. “You’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” he said. “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed.” In Springfield, Vance took the heroic story of his Middletown hillbillies, and flipped it on its head.
It’s not that Vance lets his “people” off easy. If you’ve read Hillbilly, the pathologizing of Haitians in Ohio, and fear-mongering about their social mores would sound familiar. In his memoir, the senator depicts a regional culture that was, in his estimation, ill-equipped for 21st-century society.
Vance went after his Scots-Irish “hillbillies” hard. Places like Middletown had too many people who were “immune to hard work,” he wrote. “You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.”
When they did work, it was largely in name only. Vance described timing his own co-workers’ bathroom breaks during a summer job. It was “impossible to fill” a warehouse position “with a long-term employee.” He feared these people’s lifestyles would “make it difficult to succeed in a changing world.” The culture of the white working-class “encourages social decay,” he concluded, and many of the area’s residents were a drain on public resources—people who “gamed the welfare system.”
“I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largesse enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about,” Vance wrote. “Most of us were struggling to get by, but we made do, worked hard, and hoped for a better life. But a large minority was content to live off the dole.”
Like the earlier generation of Middletown residents, who watched the hillbilly migration with suspicion, Vance also resorted to racializing the behavior he witnessed. “Bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs,” he concluded.
Vance believed the problems facing communities like Middletown, and by extension Springfield, were a product, in part, of intergenerational trauma and abuse that was endemic to his maternal grandparents’ Appalachian Scots-Irish culture. Most of his family lore “involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail,” he wrote. His Papaw, the Kentucky migrant, “could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat,” in the words of Vance’s Uncle Jimmy. Vance’s Mamaw once lit his Papaw on fire.
And while Vance has singled out recently-arrived Haitians as bad drivers, dangerous experiences on the road form a recurring subplot of his book. His grandfather was a habitual drunk driver who would “leave his car on the road, or even sideswipe a telephone pole as he maneuvered.” His grandmother, in Vance’s recounting, may have been worse behind the wheel: “Mamaw was trying to merge onto the highway after a brief stop for gas,” he writes. “She didn’t pay attention to the signs, so we found ourselves headed the wrong way on a one-way exit ramp with angry motorists swerving out of our way.” Young JD once crawled into the backseat while his mother was driving, hoping that wearing two seat belts at once would save him from what seemed like an inevitable crash.
Vance’s criticism of his neighbors in southern Ohio was part of what made the book such a hit among liberal audiences in 2016. Here was a man from Trump Country, validating the judgment of outsiders. As Vance’s Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, said in August, “JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon Valley millionaires, and then wrote a bestseller trashing that community.”
The difference is that the violent drunks lighting each other on fire are, in Vance’s narrative, the spiritual heart of America. They were the foundation to his idea of a homeland, and they still are.
“Some people may conclude that I come from a clan of lunatics,” Vance wrote. “[M]y people were extreme, but extreme in the service of something—defending a sister’s honor or ensuring that a criminal paid for his crimes,” he continued, referring to an incident back in Kentucky, in which a man accused of rape was taken from a jail and killed before he could face trial.
There’s nothing they can’t do to lose that kind of acceptance. There’s nothing the Haitians can do to gain it. Some migrant families must be separated, so that other migrant families are not. You could call all of this hypocrisy if you want, but that would elide what’s really happening. If someone considers themselves the heir of the Southern Bourbons, and waxes nostalgic for the immigration crackdowns of the 1920s, you don’t have to try too hard to square what makes the Scots-Irish lovable sinners and Caribbean transplants an existential threat. The answer is barreling down on you. It’s practically running you off the road.
