The Elections and Immigration: What Side of History Will Voters Be On?

Maribel Hastings

Posted October 31, 2024

In the home stretch of the historic 2024 presidential election, where immigration is central, I wonder whether voters will favor Republican Donald Trump’s dark, anti-immigrant vision with their vote, or whether they will recognize the value of those immigrants to the U.S. economy and fiber, and the devastating impact on several fronts of the former president’s mass deportation plan.

It’s going to be a close election, particularly in the seven battleground states: Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. The Latino vote could determine the result in several of them.

We know that Trump and his followers are motivated by racism and xenophobia, even though immigration benefits the country. We know what side they are on.

In 2020, President Joe Biden beat Trump in many states by only a few thousand votes. Ensuring Latino and others vote is vital for the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

It’s also worrying that, despite the attacks against immigrants, there are some Latinos who favor Trump, particularly Latino men, and the level of support for Harris among Latinos is lower than for previous Democratic candidates, like Biden and Barack Obama.

A segment of Latinos believe that Trump will not make good on his most feared threats to deport millions of undocumented immigrants if he returns to the White House.

Trump and his spokespeople do not say how they will implement the deportation plan. His running mate, Senator J.D. Vance, said they could start “with a million,” those with a criminal history, but did not give more details.

But Trump threatens to implement a controversial 1798 law that has only been applied three times, and only at times of war, to detain nationals of countries in conflict with the United States. The Alien Enemies Act permits the detention, relocation, or deportation of nationals from countries that are enemies of the United States for national security reasons.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the last president to invoke this law following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which provoked the U.S. intervention in the Second World War. Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans were detained in encampments. In the case of the Japanese, Executive Order 9066 was in place from 1942 until 1946. In one of the darkest chapters in the history of the United States, some 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans from the western part of the nation were forcibly taken to internment camps in the interior of the country. It is estimated that two-thirds were U.S. citizens. They were scarred by their own country, losing family, jobs, businesses, and homes.

How Trump intends to apply this law to conduct mass deportations has not been explained.

What is known is that his plan, in addition to sowing panic and destroying families, would affect the U.S. economy by deporting 5% of the country’s workforce. Some 22% of all agricultural workers, 15% of construction workers, and 8% of manufacturing workers are undocumented.

It’s also known that since Trump emerged on the political scene, his venomous discourse, sustained in terrible public policies like the separation of children from their parents at the border, has sucked all the oxygen from the national discussion, making the contributions of the immigrants that Trump demonizes a mere footnote.

America’s Voice launched a new campaign called “Reclaiming Our Story,” which seeks to remind people in the United States of the contributions made by immigrants on diverse fronts: the economy, sciences, and culture. It also emphasizes the essential role that immigrants play in the future of our nation. Immigration was previously a bipartisan topic that has now “been eclipsed by the right’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

But their contributions are fundamental. In Arizona, for example, immigrants contribute $3.2 billion in state and local taxes combined and $5.9 billion in Federal taxes. And those same undocumented people in Arizona that Trump demonizes contribute $704 million annually in state and local taxes combined, according to a study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. These are taxes destined for diverse services and infrastructure that benefit the entire population.

This happens in each state, whether or not they are battleground states, because undocumented people paid $96.7 billion in Federal, state, and local taxes in 2022 and finance programs they cannot use because they are undocumented, like Social Security and Medicare.

We know that Trump and his followers are motivated by racism and xenophobia, even though immigration benefits the country. We know what side they are on.

On what side of history will the voters be?

Maribel Hastings is a Senior Advisor to América’s Voice.