Why Trump Is Winning With Some Georgia Immigrants

One of every four residents of Gwinnett County, Georgia, was born outside the United States. That’s nearly double the national average, and those numbers keep growing in this metro Atlanta area, which is home to a richly diverse community of Latin, Asian and European immigrants.

It’s also a community that can’t be pigeonholed when it comes to politics in this critical swing state.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants “poisoning the blood of this country,” and his promises “to launch the largest deportation in the history of the country” have been ugly and vile. But many naturalized citizens I met in the area are voting for him in November anyway.

Their reasons don’t vary much. They cite their struggles with inflation, the appeal of Trump’s machismo and their perception that they were doing better four years ago despite the former president’s handling of the pandemic. 

“Under President Trump, we had prosperity. We had hope,” Thuy Hotle told me. “The economy was booming. There was peace around the world and then, all of a sudden, in less than three years, everything is upside down.”

Hotle emigrated from Vietnam and now lives south of Atlanta. What was evident from her and the other first-generation immigrants I spoke with is that their arguments rely on distortions dished out by Trump and his supporters as amplified by the right-wing media machine. As with most political rhetoric, they assign blame without context. But what distinguishes them from Trump is that they differentiate themselves from the border-crossing asylum seekers, including those Trump has degraded as rapists and “murderers.”

“Not all immigrants are the same,” said Rafael Cruz, 57, a naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic who came to the US when he was 10. He’s now a business consultant for the restaurant industry and a project manager at a Gwinnett County-based construction company.

“As a mentor, I’ve seen the difference between then and now,” Cruz explained.

He is a leader in the local Dominican community and employs dozens of workers. There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity. But he, like other Trump supporters, won’t talk about how Congress for decades stalled attempts to fix the country’s broken immigration system. They don’t acknowledge Trump’s border policy of separating parents from their children or that he sabotaged the toughest immigration agreement in decades last year when he decided it would hurt his campaign.

“Hispanics have always been more about family and about God and giving an opportunity to their kids,” Cruz said. “The newer immigrants — they can’t even concentrate on one thing. It takes a while. The learning curve, once you get here, it’s a little more difficult for the ones that are coming in.”

Cruz has sympathy for the hardships these newcomers encounter, he said. His parents relocated to Georgia from New York to give him the opportunities he now credits for success. But he has no sympathy for those who arrived here without documentation. And it is here that his argument goes to a dark place, tangled by the conspiracy theories and racially charged lies of the MAGA machine.

He explains that those crossing the border receive an array of assistance and suggests, without evidence, that the funds are from “Democratic donors” who have the migrants’ “immigration papers fast-tracked” with the goal of “replacing the votes.” 

It sounds like a sinister plot, similar to the widespread false claims peddled by Republicans that large numbers of non-citizens are voting in elections. This alternate reality argument will serve as a convenient foundation to claim the election was rigged if Trump loses.

I asked Cruz where he got his information, and he assured me, “I know people.” I heard the same claims talking to other Trump supporters who are naturalized citizens. 

“The people who are coming illegally from the southern border are given free education, free housing, free cell phone, EBT cards,” said Jacqueline Tseng, who fled the communist genocide in Cambodia as a child and ran unsuccessfully for the Gwinnett County Commission in 2020. She implied that the migrant assistance comes from taxpayers, not the non-governmental organizations and nonprofit groups that are the source.

“My mom came here with five children under the age of 11,” she said. “When we came here, my mom had to work three jobs to put food on the table,” and the family had to pay back “every penny” for the plane tickets to Georgia. To her, any humanitarian aid Democrats offer to people crossing the border illegally is unfair.

Her husband, Louis Tseng, who emigrated from Taiwan, is equally angry at the Biden administration. He repeated Trump’s lies that money intended for hurricane disaster relief had been diverted to migrants who crossed the southern border. “We spent hundreds of [dollars] to take care of illegal immigrants — they get health care, they get housing, they get school, everything. What about our own American people?”

The decision to house and educate migrants is a state decision. Federal law expressly forbids FEMA from giving cash aid to undocumented immigrants and advises them to turn to private groups, such as the American Red Cross, for assistance.

Georgia is expected to play a decisive role in the path to the White House, especially the metro Atlanta suburbs. Gwinnett County, once a Republican stronghold, has become a Democratic enclave that helped Biden win the state by less than 12,000 votes in 2020.

The race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is tight here — within the margin of error in statewide polls — and Harris is doing better with voters on immigration than Biden did. But it’s not enough.

At a Univision town hall Harris held in Las Vegas last Thursday, the daughter of an undocumented immigrant who died after being unable to access health care asked the vice president what she would do to help people like her mother. Harris didn’t answer her directly, except to say she supports the immigration reform bill Trump killed. 

Harris needs to do better than that. The right-wing information bubble seems to be impenetrable, even among voters whom you would think would be offended by Trump’s bigotry. Some voters will be a lost cause, but Harris would do well to show she understands both the fairness argument and the humanitarian one if she hopes to break through.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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