Tiny Ohio town of 3,500 buckling after taking in 3,000 African refugees

Another Ohio town is feeling the same migrant squeeze that people in Springfield, OH have been expressing. This time it’s a small town not far from big city Cincinnati that is trying to cope with a flood of Mauritanian illegal immigrants. With the population of Lockland having doubled with the 3,000 new additions, the town is looking at an economic downturn and a lower quality of life.

"If you look at 2021, 2022, the United States had seen a huge influx of immigrants from Mauritania. Somehow, a good number of them have landed in Lockland," Lockland Village Administrator Doug Wehmeyer told Fox News Digital.

A Washington Post analysis from June noted that over 15,000 foreign nationals from Mauritania entered the to the US last year, a 2,800 percent uptick in number over 2022, when only 543 came to America. Wehmeyer said that kind of population explosion has meant overcrowding in apartment complexes and with some units housing up to 12 people.

"You have an apartment building that's . . . say, 80 units at four people per unit. That's about 320 people. When you double or maybe even triple that population, the building systems aren't designed to handle that."

"So when you use the utilities, that's backing up. We have instances where people are going in to take a shower and feces is running out of the drains, filling the bathtubs as it comes from a floor above. That's compounded probably by the cooking methods that they use, which is a heavy grease-laden process," he added. With that high a number of inhabitants in the building, it makes it especially unsafe if a fire or natural disaster occurs and people have to vacate immediately.

Wehmeyer also said that illegal immigrants the are not working and probably only will be if they claim and receive asylum and get work permits. "So, most of the immigrants living in Lockland are
unable to work. And if they are unable to work, they're unable to pay taxes," he said. "And they have essentially displaced the taxpaying residents of these 200 apartment units and filled them with non-tax-paying residents. We're losing about $125,000 to 150,000 in revenue because of that," he told Fox.

The village administrator says he has reached out to both the state and federal governments for assistance to deal with the financial stress caused by the mass arrivals. "I don't know how they found our small village. We like it. We think it's a great place to live, but the quality of life here is definitely being affected by this problem," he said.

According to a report from the Washington DC-based non-profit Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), federal, state and municipal governments paid $150 billion to pay for the consequences of illegal immigration in 2023. While illegal immigrants get access to taxpayer-funded services like health care and education, taxpayers lose services like police and firefighters.

In a recent interview with Telemundo, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to advocate for amnesty for illegal immigrants in the US.