Six years after former President Donald Trump made his way to the White House with a campaign based on nativist and xenophobic gestures to attract white voters, the 3,200 km of the line that divides Mexico from the United States has once again become an obsession of the United States. Republican party.
But the resurgence of the issue among the right comes with a new detail: More and more Republican leaders and candidates are now declaring, without any factual basis, that immigrants who are in the country illegally have gained the right to vote.
Election fraud is extremely rare, and claims that large numbers of immigrants living in the US illegally are voting have been repeatedly denied. Yet this fabricated message, which capitalizes on a threat concocted to reinforce Trump’s broader lie about allegedly rigged elections, is now finding a receptive audience in more than 12 states across the country, including several far from the Mexican border.
In Macomb County, Michigan, where Republicans are sharply divided between those wanting to investigate the 2020 election and those wanting to leave the matter behind, many voters at the local Republican convention this month said they feared immigrants were entering the country illegally. not just to steal jobs from Americans, but also to steal votes by fraudulently accessing the polls to elect Democratic candidates.
“I don’t want them to get to the red states [de maioria republicana] and convert them to blue [de maioria democrata]”, said Mark Checkeroski, a former chief engineer at a hospital. This is despite data from the 2020 election showing that many places with a significant immigrant population have shifted to the right.
The uncompromising speech about illegal immigration and border security has been a constant in American politics for years. Both Republicans and Democrats — in recent years, especially the Republican Party — have historically adhered to prejudiced stereotypes that link illegal immigration to criminality and portray Latinos and Asian Americans as eternally foreign to their country, or worse, as an economic threat. .
But the leap from insecure borders to insecure elections is more recent. And it’s not hard to understand why some voters make this connection.
In Ohio, where Republicans vying for a tight Senate primary election speak of immigration in apocalyptic terms and run ads showing black-and-white surveillance video or blurry footage of people crossing the border, Trump at a rally last Saturday (23), stoked fears of “open borders and horrible elections” by calling for stricter laws requiring voter ID documents and proof of citizenship at polling stations.
Campaign advertisements and publicity materials for right-wing documentaries shown on screens before the former president’s speech seemed to alternate between lies, saying that the 2020 election was stolen, and exaggerated phrases accusing immigrants of crimes who are in the country. illegally. In the trailer for a film by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative film author and director whom Trump pardoned for making illegal campaign contributions, people denounced the alleged “vote trafficking”, likening the work of apparent voter liaison groups to ” Mexican Mafia” and describing as “mules” the people who carried votes sent by mail to postal ballot boxes.
It is legally permissible in some states for third parties, such as a voter’s family members or community organizations, to take completed ballots to postal ballot boxes. During the pandemic, the practice has gained vital importance for many people.
But the messages seem tailor-made for people who attended the rally, like Alicia Cline, 40, who said she believed the ruling Democrats were using the border crisis to woo more votes. “The past election has already been stolen,” said Cline, a horticulturist in Columbus, Ohio. “I think the establishment is using people who cross the border in large numbers to get more votes for itself.”
The latest wave of stoking fears that immigrants are stealing votes is just one of several lines of attack. Republicans are making immigration one of their focus in this year’s congressional elections, and Republican governors are confronting the Biden administration over what they describe as abysmal conditions at the border.
Last week, governors in 26 states announced the creation of a “border strike force” to share intelligence and fight drug trafficking, even as the Biden administration says it plans to cancel a Trump-era rule allowing federal immigration officials reject asylum seekers or summarily deport them.
Jane Timken, a candidate for the federal Senate and former chairman of the state Republican Party, said that Mexico’s border is of enormous importance to Ohioans, because many consider the state’s drug and crime problems to come from the border. “Today almost all states are border states,” she said.
Some Republican strategists warn that a focus on immigration could backfire and end up hurting the party as the nation becomes increasingly diverse. But historians and political scientists say that by tapping into fears raised by changing demographics and the pandemic, Republicans can mobilize their most ardent voters.
“When we’re feeling so much anxiety, this is the time when xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment can grow,” said Geraldo L. Cadava, who studies the presence of Latinos in the United States and is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University.
Few nationwide election races capture the dynamics of the issue as perfectly as the Republican Senate primary in Ohio. The candidates there are following the example of Trump, who in 2016 tried to blame the lethal opioid crisis on illegal immigration and the Mexican drug cartels.
As companies closed factories and transferred jobs to other countries, anger and resentment toward foreigners began to grow. The opioid crisis has intensified the devastation, with unscrupulous drugmakers and doctors cashing in on pain medications.
But, according to federal and local law enforcement officials, after the closure of so-called “pain clinics”, medical clinics specializing in the diagnosis and control of pain, Mexican criminal organizations have taken their place. In Ohio, these organizations transport large volumes of methadone and fentanyl, often in the form of counterfeit pills, along Highway 71, which crosses the state and passes through Columbus. Overdose rates in the state are among the highest in the country.
JD Vance, author of “Once Upon a Dream” and endorsed by Donald Trump, sprinkles salt on these wounds, telling voters in an ad that he nearly lost his drug-addicted mother to “the poison that comes to us from the other side.” of our border”.
Republicans like Vance argue they are unfairly attacked for raising legitimate concerns, pointing to massive drug seizures and a surge in border seizures, which in June last year reached the highest level in 20 years.
Lawyers advocating for immigrant rights say Republicans are incorrectly characterizing a public health emergency as a national security issue and contributing to prejudice against Latinos and immigrants, whether they are US citizens or not.
They also say that criticism by Republicans has no basis in reality: many, if not most, immigrants arriving in Ohio have already been screened by federal immigration agencies. Many of them are refugees and asylum seekers, and more and more of them arrive on work visas.
Angela Plummer, executive director of the NGO Community Refugee and Immigration Services, described the way Republican Senate candidates have been characterizing immigrants as a disturbing flashback to Donald Trump’s 2015 campaign speech. “It’s nice to have politicians with different platforms on immigration. , but it is not good for them to engage in racism and harmful accusations.”
In the same campaign, JD Vance says President Joe Biden’s immigration policy leads to “more Democratic voters flooding this country” — explicitly stating that unauthorized immigrants cross the border and gain access to the polls to support the left.
The immigration discourse began to heat up last year, amid an influx of migrants and asylum seekers from Haiti, Guatemala and Honduras. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott and local officials described illegal immigration as an “invasion,” and Abbott announced plans to complete Trump’s border wall.
The accusations have only intensified with the campaign for parliamentary elections. Since January, Republican candidates in 18 states, including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, have run ads mentioning the border and attacking legal immigration. The information is from AdImpact, which monitors spending on election campaigns. In the same period in 2018, this was done in just six states, and most of the ads came out in Texas.
At least one of the ads speaks of an “invasion”. Others echo the notion of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory that falsely claims that elites are using black and brown immigrants to take the place of whites in the United States.
In Alabama, an ad for the campaign to re-elect Governor Kay Ivey features a photo of Latinos crossing the border wearing white T-shirts with the Biden campaign logo and the words “Please let us in.” If Biden continues to “transport” illegal immigrants to the United States, Americans may soon be forced to learn Spanish, the governor says, ending with “no way, José.”
A spokeswoman for Ivey dismissed as “absurd” the suggestion that the ad reinforces fears of substitution or perpetuates prejudice against Latinos and immigrants.
