Activists in swing Michigan county are alarmed by Hispanic voters backing Trump despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric

Activists in swing Michigan county are alarmed by Hispanic voters backing Trump despite his anti-immigrant rhetoric

Dan Soza has seen the harsh realities of Donald Trump’s immigration policies up close and so he is alarmed that many Latino voters in Saginaw, Michigan, do not take seriously the former US president’s threats of mass deportations.

As a child welfare officer in Saginaw, Soza places young unaccompanied refugees in foster families and watched the Trump administration’s separation of children from their parents at the Mexican border in 2018 with alarm. He said the cruelty of that policy, and the former president’s threats against refugees legally in the US, should serve as a warning that Trump might do what he says.

“A lot of people who are Latino or Hispanic – whether it be in Saginaw, Michigan, or in the country – when they hear him say those things, they don’t think he’s talking about them,” said Soza.

“What really worries me is that people don’t remember their history. This has happened before. We’ve seen mass deportations before and when it happened American citizens were deported.”

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  • Rolando@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 month ago

    Kind of a clickbait headline but there are some interesting parts in the text… It’s worth keeping these in mind when doing election outreach in the US.

    "… I feel like we, as Latinos, are traditionally conservative.”

    “traditionally conservative” is a tautology, and this statement is a bit exaggerated, but Latinos do often have strong values associated with family, religion, work, and other things that conservatives try to “own”.

    Paschall said that if there is racism, it comes from white liberals who tell her that, as a Latina, she should not support Trump. She describes that view as “so deep-rooted that they don’t even realise they’re being racist”.

    I disagree with Paschall’s assertion. However, while white liberals call Republicans “weird”, those same white liberals often come across as weird to people who don’t share their ideas. DISCLAIMER: I think Republicans are weird and agree with white liberals more often than not. I’m just describing some of the attitudes I see here in my battleground state, so we can communicate better during voter outreach. END DISCLAIMER

    There are other factors at play. The proportion of Mexicans crossing the border to work without visas has dropped sharply in recent years with much larger numbers of people now coming from Central and South America as refugees. They sometimes face hostility from more established Latino communities, about 60% of which are of Mexican ancestry.

    There’s a tendency to think of Latinos as some monolithic people, but this paragraph describes one way that isn’t true. Even if you only consider those with the right to vote, there’s a tremendous difference between say a third-generation Cuban-American, a recent Central American naturalized citizen in Nevada, a second-generation Puerto Rican in Georgia, and a Tejano whose family has lived here for hundreds of years. Each of them have a wide variety of priorities and opinions, it’s not all about immigration. And if they vote for Trump it’s not just that they’re brainwashed or ignorant, a lot of times they’re holding their nose in the same way a lot of people on the left are holding their nose to vote for Kamala. (Not me! I think she’s all right! In fact I just recently signed up to help her campaign, I hope it’s not too late…)