Conservative media took advantage of this. From July 2013 to June 2014, Fox News mentioned the border at least 5,300 times. In July 2014, the month the crisis peaked, the border was mentioned on Fox News more than 7,100 times. Breitbart, then near the peak of its influence, fueled concerns about immigrants. bring Ebola in the country.
Immigration has become a central topic of right-wing commentary. After Obama’s re-election in 2012, the right briefly flirted with signing legislation that would provide a path to citizenship for immigrants. After 2014, however, the power of a fervent anti-immigration platform with the Republican base became clear.
Donald Trump understood this. When he announced his candidacy for president in June 2015, he demonized immigrants and made border protection a centerpiece of his campaign. Fox News had moved on, and Trump’s comments sparked a backlash — but that backlash simply drew attention to his rhetoric and sparked his rise in the polls.
It’s easy to see how this pattern played out in retrospect, how Trump’s willingness to repeat the anti-immigration rhetoric prevalent in right-wing media differentiated him from his more cautious, mainstream opponents and positioned him as a “truth teller” on this and other subjects. problems. Harder to gauge is what happened in 2020 — Trump’s standing improved among Hispanic voters, who had strongly opposed him in 2016 — and what that portends for 2024.
The night before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy – 60 years ago Wednesday – he was in Houston during an event organized by the League of United Latin American Citizens. Kennedy’s campaign was credited with one of the first targeted efforts to appeal to Hispanic voters, but thanks to strict immigration laws in place at the time, there were relatively few Hispanic voters in court. That year, Hispanics made up 3.5 percent Population; NOW, about 1 in 5 U.S. residents are Hispanic.
This is partly thanks to Kennedy. His death sparked enormous goodwill from Democratic leaders and Lyndon B. Johnson, who was sworn in as Air Force president an hour after Kennedy’s death. The Kennedy brothers advocated a bill relax immigration restrictionscame into force in 1965. Immigration, particularly from Mexico, increased.
From 1980 to 2020, the density of Hispanics in the population almost tripled. On average, counties in the continental United States saw their percentage of Hispanic population increase from 4.4% to 10.5%. Large increases in the percentage of Hispanics have been seen across the country, in both red and blue counties.
This map doesn’t tell the whole story, however.
Last month, researchers from Tufts University and Loyola University Chicago published an updated analysis of the effects of illegal migration to the United States. Ernesto Tiburcio and Kara Ross Camarena determined that increasing the number of undocumented immigrants in a county “significantly increases the Republican Party’s vote share in federal elections and decreases total government spending.”
Their analysis, based on anonymized data on 8.8 million Mexican nationals living in the United States, focused on elections, including the 2014 midterms.
“A one percentage point increase in the number of illegal immigrants is associated with a 6.51 point increase in Republican vote share” in the midterm elections, write Tiburcio and Ross Camarena. An increase in the number of immigrants at the middle or middle level results in “a 3.93 point increase in the vote share for Republican candidates” in the House midterms while, in presidential years, it is estimated to result in ” a 1.61 point increase in vote share for Republican candidates.” candidates for the House and a 2.22 point increase for the Republican presidential candidate.
This may not have had a decisive effect on the election results, they note, because the averages could be skewed by larger shifts in more Republican areas. That said, their analysis suggests that “recent illegal Mexican migrants are shifting voting preferences to the right across the country, potentially deciding narrow races.”
Given these estimates, one might think that this means bad news for President Biden’s re-election bid. After all, more than 2.2 million arrests were made by the Border Patrol last year, an increase of nearly 450% from 2020. The relative rate of apprehensions (people stopped between border crossings border control) was 6.6 per 1,000 U.S. residents, the highest since 1986, when there were about 6.7 stops per resident.
But we immediately see the limits of the estimates noted by Tiburcio and Ross Camarena. In 1986, Democrats gained five House seats. In 2022, they lost nine, but overperformed projections.
So it’s probably more useful to look at what happened in 2020. Compared to 2016, many of the nation’s most densely Hispanic counties shifted to the right, giving Trump wider margins of victory or narrower margins of defeat. These changes are due to the fact that more Hispanic counties voted less for the Democratic candidate and voted more for Trump compared to the low-turnout 2016 contest.
Analysis carried out by Equis Labs following the proposed election a convincing theory about what changed: because immigration declined in 2020 (thanks to the pandemic), immigration became less important and Trump spent less time complaining about it. Instead, he focused on the economy, where his poll numbers among Hispanics were much better.
An interesting aspect of this change, however, is that the largest changes have occurred in certain geographic areas, such as South Florida and counties along the U.S.-Mexico border. Writing for Texas Monthly in September 2021, Jack Herrera explored why counties near that state’s border were more receptive to Trump, finding that Hispanics there were often more established in the United States and differentiated from each other and Trump’s excoriations of newcomers – a group they were not part.
“Hispanic residents of our state are much more likely to identify as White than Hispanic residents of cities elsewhere in the country,” Herrera wrote. “Having deep, generations-long roots in lands that were annexed from Mexican to U.S. control, many also actively reject being considered immigrants. »
In the map at the top of this article, you can see that the relative change in Hispanic population from 1980 to 2020 has been modest in these Texas border counties.
In fact, if we group counties into deciles (i.e. 10 brackets) based on the increase in the Hispanic percentage of the population from 2010 to 2020 and the percentage of the county that was Hispanic in 2020, we see that the largest shifts to the right from 2016 to 2020 were in places with high Hispanic populations but low recent growth – the counties at the top right, below.
That slice at the top right, marking counties that are at or above the 90th percentile of Hispanic population, but below the 10th percentile changing since 2010? They moved to the right by 8.5 points on average in 2020.
They are also, collectively, relatively populous counties. Nearly 26 million people live in the three groups of counties with the highest Hispanic populations but the three lowest levels of increase since 2010. That’s about as many as live in the counties shown at the bottom right , those with the highest Hispanic population and largest increase since 2010. (These counties also voted more Republican on average.)
A final observation, taken from my recent book: Hispanic voters living in areas with a less dense Hispanic population are less likely to be registered as Democrats than Hispanics living in more densely populated Hispanic areas. This is yet another data point supporting the (admittedly unsurprising) idea that assimilation plays a role.
Biden still holds an advantage among Hispanic voters in (very) early 2024 polls. It is possible that immigration will be a more important issue in 2024 than in 2020, as it appears almost certain, could strengthen Biden’s standing with some Hispanics (consistent with Equis’ analysis) while failing to appeal to established Hispanic populations like those documented by Herrera. Non-Hispanic voters, meanwhile, may be pushed to the right by the surge in immigration, consistent with research by Tiburcio and Ross Camarena, although it does not appear to have had a significant effect on the 2022 results.
We can probably make two safe assumptions. First, the increase in immigration in recent years will be more negative than positive for Biden in his confrontation with Trump. And second, anyone who still views the Hispanic vote as a monolith will draw the wrong conclusions about the upcoming presidential election.
