Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric: Will it boost or backfire with Hispanic voters?

Andres Oppenheimer

One of the biggest mysteries of the Nov. 5 elections is why Republican candidate Donald Trump — who insults undocumented migrants on a daily basis and has claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — has been gaining ground among Hispanic voters.

To be sure, Trump is far from leading in the polls among Hispanic voters, as he falsely claims all the time. But Trump has been gradually eroding the Democrats’ once massive support among Latinos nationwide, and expanding his lead in major sub-groups such as Cuban-Americans in South Florida.

A recent New York Times-Siena poll of Hispanic voters shows Trump is getting 37% of the Latino vote nationwide, while vice-president and Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is winning 56% of the vote. A separate Pew Research Center poll shows a similar result, with Harris winning the Hispanic vote by 57% to 39%.

But Trump has increased his margin of Latino support by about 9 percentage points since the 2016 elections, while Harris is getting about 12 percentage points fewer than what former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton got that year, polls show.

Harris campaign spokespeople say that perhaps they haven’t been fully successful in making sure that Latinos who don’t regularly follow the news are aware of Trump’s own statements dehumanizing immigrants and spouting racial hatred. And there should be much more awareness about Trump’s vow to carry out the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, which could entail indiscriminate arrests of Latinos on the streets, they say.

“We should be doing a much better job reminding the Hispanic community about this man’s conduct when he was president, his hate-mongering rhetoric, his claims that immigrants are the cause of this country’s problems, and his plan to carry out mass deportations,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Julissa Reynoso, a former U.S. ambassador to Spain, told me.

In the campaign’s closing days, the central theme of Trump’s campaign is his false claim that most undocumented immigrants are criminals, and that they have “invaded” this country. In fact, several studies have shown that unauthorized migrants on average commit fewer violent crimes than U.S.-born Americans, and U.S. Customs and Border Patrol figures show that the number of unauthorized border crossings has plummeted by 70% this year.

“These people are animals,” Trump said at a Sept. 28 campaign rally. He claimed that “They make our criminals look like babies.”

Lashing out against immigrants for what he claimed are high crime rates, Trump said in an Oct. 7 interview with a right-wing radio host that “it’s in their genes…and we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”

Trump has been ramping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric since his 2016 campaign, when he famously claimed that Mexican immigrants “are bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

Despite the fact that his claims about undocumented immigrants have been proven wrong, Trump has turned his anti-immigration crusade into his top campaign issue. He recently falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are eating the dogs and cats of residents of Springfield, Ohio, despite the fact that Springfield police authorities, the city’s Republican mayor and Ohio’s Republican governor denied the former president’s assertion.

Ernesto Castañeda, head of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University, says that one of the reasons why so many Latinos support Trump is that they do not believe he is talking about them when he launches his tirades against immigrants.

“Some of them say, ‘He’s not talking about me. He’s talking about others, the bad immigrants. I’m a good immigrant,’” Castañeda told me. That’s a tricky proposition, he added, because once you legitimize racial hatred against one ethnic group, you normalize hate against Jews, Muslims and all minorities.

In addition, many Latinos living in Republican districts are so eager to blend into their communities that they adopt their neighbors’ pro-Trump stands. Some Hispanics “believe that the best way to be accepted as Americans is to vote for Trump. They think that will increase their sense of belonging,” Castañeda told me.

Trump supporters say the rise in Latino support for the former president is because Hispanics fared better under Trump, although economic statistics don’t support that claim .

Hispanics are better off today than during the Trump years, most economic data show. The unemployment rate for Latinos has nearly fallen by half during Biden’s term, although that’s in part because the economy has recovered since the pandemic. Despite higher inflation in the first two years of the Biden administration, Latinos’ inflation-adjusted wages are higher today than during Trump’s years in office, a Poynter Institute study based on official data shows.

Trump has also tried to make the case that Latino immigrants are taking away jobs from long established Hispanics, but that’s another false claim. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, there is a huge shortage of workers to fill jobs that Americans don’t want to do.

My own guess is that Trump’s rise among Hispanic voters — which is mainly taking place among men, according to the polls — may have something to do with some Latinos’ subconscious attraction to authoritarian leaders. Many may have a soft spot for “hombres fuertes,” or strong men, even if such leaders have often destroyed the countries they came from.

But perhaps the main reason for Trump’s gains among Hispanics is that the Democratic Party has taken the Latino vote for granted. Democrats know they will easily win major Hispanic population states such as California and New York, and that they will lose Florida and Texas. So they don’t spend much resources trying to court Hispanic voters, even if they could be a deciding factor in swing states such as Nevada or Arizona.

Unlike former President Barack Obama, who used to air campaign ads speaking in what sounded like fluent Spanish — even though he didn’t speak the language — you don’t see Harris or any of her potential Cabinet members do that today. And Trump has done a much better job than Harris wooing Cuban-American voters, for instance, who care deeply about their native country.

If the polls are right and more Latinos drift toward Trump, it will be a weird case of a growing minority of Hispanic voters embracing a candidate who regularly insults them and stokes racial hatred against them. Moreover, Trump has not done a thing to improve their economic situation. But that’s what charismatic populists do: they are great at convincing people to vote against their own interests.