Hispanic Voters Prove Immigration is Not a ‘Wedge’ Issue After All

FAIR Take | November 2024

For years, Americans have heard the refrain: immigration is not a concern of average Americans.  Rather, immigration is just a wedge issue, used to pit targeted groups against each other. Thus, any call for setting limits or enforcing laws is merely an anti-immigrant “dog whistle” to fringe constituencies that should be labeled as racist and resisted.

As last week’s elections proved, Americans of all stripes are deeply concerned about immigration. The only people who see immigration as a wedge issue are talking heads, academics and coastal elitists. And even they are now grudgingly conceding the point. “There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” Muzaffar Chishti, a long-time advocate for large-scale immigration, admitted to the New York Times.

Ever since Ronald Reagan swept the 1984 election, the Democratic Party has sought to reshape the electorate, banking on immigrants becoming the backbone of a new political coalition that supported big government and expansion of the welfare state. Under the Biden-Harris administration, the party went all-in on that strategy, throwing open our borders and bending or breaking just about every immigration law on the books. They wound up losing big-time.

The initial data from last week’s elections indicate that key components of the coalition the Democratic Party had hoped would enshrine them as the majority party for generations to come rejected the idea of unchecked immigration – perhaps none more so than Hispanic-American voters.

Overall, Donald Trump won 45 percent of the Hispanic vote in the 2024 election and an outright majority, 54 percent, of Hispanic men. These are the highest percentages for any Republican in recent history which mark a stunning reversal from previous elections. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the Hispanic male vote by 31 points, while eight years later, Trump out-polled Vice President Kamala Harris by 12 points among that demographic group – a 43-point swing over two election cycles.

Polling and anecdotal evidence suggests that the migration of Hispanic voters to the Trump camp was not in spite of his more law and order-oriented positions on immigration, but because of those views. Polling conducted just prior to the election found that Hispanic voters, by a 44 percent to 36 percent margin, trusted Trump to secure the border over Harris.

Hispanic support for stricter immigration policies was especially evident in counties in the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump saw dramatic gains. As Axios reports, in Hidalgo County, Texas, where Hispanics make up 92 percent of the population, Trump won by 51 percent of the vote. In Cameron County, Texas, where Hispanics make up 89 percent of the population at the southern tip of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Trump beat Harris, 53-47. In the 2020 election, Biden won Hidalgo County with 58% of the vote and Cameron County with 56% of the vote. Trump saw similar increases in other Texas border counties.

Vote for President by Party and County in the Rio Grande Valley:
2020 (left) vs. 2024 (right)

Source: CNN.com/election/2020 and CNN.com/election/2024

These numbers should not come as a surprise.  For the last several years, news outlets have described how Hispanic Americans have become angry and frustrated about the harmful impact that mass immigration is having on their lives. Kalman Nunez, a Hispanic voter in the swing state of Wisconsin, complained to NBC News that the flood of migrants is taking jobs away from people like him. “Immigration is out of control. Trump is going to put an end to that,” he said. Whether it is jobs, schools, affordable housing, or access to public services, Hispanic Americans are often the ones most directly affected by unchecked immigration.

Despite the fact that many Hispanics in Texas and across the country voted for Trump, some “journalists” could not, or would not, question their old narrative. As Axios wrote: “Latino voters appeared to look beyond the racist rhetoric Trump [has] used to describe undocumented immigrants in an election in which the economy and inflation were top concerns of many voters.”

Clearly, other issues contributed to the inroads that Republicans made with Hispanic voters and other groups of previously reliable Democratic voters. These include the economy, inflation, crime, and perceived attacks on core social and cultural values. Thus, as the new administration and the Congress (likely with majorities in both chambers) prepare to take office in January, they will have a broad mandate to carry out President-elect Trump’s agenda to secure our borders and begin removing illegal aliens who entered with impunity under the outgoing administration.

They will also have a unique opportunity to enact commonsense immigration reform that is supported by a broad majority of Americans. The new administration and the 119^th Congress must capitalize on this opportunity. Fresh off their broad-based electoral sweep, they must enact real border and immigration enforcement legislation, like H.R. 2, that will prevent future administrations from acting lawlessly the way the Biden-Harris administration has done. At the same time, they will have a chance to overhaul our irrational, family chain migration-driven legal immigration process and replace it with a merit-based one that is fairer and geared toward serving identifiable national interests.

Political mandates do not come along very often, nor do they tend to last very long. Last week, a broad swath of the American electorate put to rest the notion that immigration reform and border security are divisive, wedge issues. FAIR will be working between now and Inauguration Day to make sure that the opportunity is not squandered.