Why Trump is winning with some Georgia immigrants

Mary Ellen Klas, Tribune News Service

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 U.S. 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.

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.

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.

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.