WSJ What’s News - Chasing the Vote: How the Illegal-Immigration Debate Plays in Pennsylvania

Episode Date: November 3, 2024

The third-largest city in Pennsylvania, Allentown, now has a majority of Hispanic residents, a demographic shift that’s given fresh importance here to one of the big issues in the presidential election: immigration and securing the southern border. In the final stretch of the campaign, both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have visited the city and the surrounding Lehigh Valley, which is considered a key swing area in this battleground state. For our “Chasing the Vote” series, WSJ political reporter Jimmy Vielkind spoke with residents around the valley, including immigrants, to see how candidates’ talk about the border is driving voters and how the issue is playing a central role in the local Congressional race between Democrat Susan Wild and Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Plus, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain weighs in on how Democrats are framing the discussion about newly arrived workers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is not a recommendation or offer to buy, sell, or retain any specific investment or service. Most of the volunteers coming off the buses were Dominican Americans, and most of them lived in New York. But on a Saturday morning this fall, they were about 90 miles west of Manhattan in Allentown, the third largest city in Pennsylvania, to campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris. They grabbed breakfast sandwiches and donned t-shirts. Some danced as speakers played merengue beats.

One woman laid out the stakes. For a presidential man, you put in a cage and send back to your country, because you don't like us, right? Or you vote for Harris and stay here and keep the democracy going. That's all. That is the choice. Okay? A majority of Allentown's residents are now Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,

a demographic shift that's given fresh importance here to one of the big issues in the presidential election, immigration and securing the southern border. There are many residents from the Dominican Republic and Central America, as well as Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. According to Diana Robinson, a leader in Pennsylvania of the advocacy group Make the Road Action, many families here have a mix of people who are eligible to vote and others who aren't. We know what it's like to live under Trump administration. We know what that means for our communities.

It means more deportations. It means more policing of our communities. It means more harm, more anti-immigrant rhetoric. And we see it play out in the state right now. Another canvasser was Eridania Jimenez, who comes from the Dominican Republic and is in the process of getting her citizenship. She's lived in Pennsylvania for a year and has spent a lot of her time talking to Latino voters about the elections.

She said she felt like Harris understands the immigrant experience because her mother came from India. Former President Donald Trump has centered his campaign around cracking down on illegal immigration and blames migrants for crime and competition for jobs. Some voters here expressed a similar sentiment. I don't think you should have a wide open border, truthfully. So the fact that he is working to close the border and protect other women like me, that makes me feel safe.

Many Democrats see the influx of migrants as a source of economic growth and cultural richness, even though many in the party agree with Republicans that the situation on the southern border is a crisis. But so far away from the border, how much does this topic really resonate? And for those who do see immigration as one of their top issues, do they align more with Trump or Harris? I'm Jimmy Vielekind and this is Chasing the Vote, a multi-part series from the Wall Street Journal. This is the final installment of our look at how major campaign issues are playing out in battleground states. Our last episode looked at how Wisconsin voters are weighing the economy.

I came to Pennsylvania to ask voters about immigration and how it will play into their vote for president. Illegal crossings reached record highs earlier in the Biden administration before declining this year. But what's happened is even as Trump's rhetoric actually hasn't changed that dramatically, the situation has sort of caught up to meet him where he is. So people are actually much more fed up about immigration. That's my colleague, immigration reporter Michelle Hackman. More people arrived at the southern border after the COVID-19 pandemic ebbed, escaping economic and political unrest in Central and South America.

More than two and a half million migrants crossed the southern border in 2023, according to the Department of Homeland Security. That resulted in net immigration of 3.3 million people last year, up from an annual average of 919,000 in the 2010s. Trump also had a surge of migrants under his administration. Many were people seeking asylum who are then released by border patrol agents while they wait for those claims to be adjudicated, sometimes years in the future. Many get permits to legally work, but their status is in limbo, even if they marry U.S.

citizens or have children. The newcomers have caught voters' attention. Last month, some 23% of poll respondents said immigration was the top issue motivating their choice of candidate, the largest share in journal surveys dating back a year and a half. They've seen chaos at the border on TV for years. And more than that, they've seen sort of the effects of what they feel like are unchecked immigration in their cities and towns. To emphasize the point, Republican governors in border states chartered buses to send some

of those migrants to northern cities. In New York, local officials have spent billions setting up tent cities to shelter asylum seekers. For all sorts of reasons, economic and otherwise are fanning out to places beyond just New York and Chicago, right? Like, it's possible that you are dropped off in New York City, but you hear through the grapevine that actually there's an open job waiting for you in Pennsylvania. That's meant areas like Allentown, in the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, are seeing rapid change.

A lot's different there from 1982, when Billy Joel sang about a city where people felt stuck. When we're living here in Allentown, and they're posing all the factors down. Allentown Mayor Matt Turk, a Democrat whose grandmother immigrated from Cuba, said that song unfairly portrays the city. He told me the economy is doing well and the political stakes are high, including a competitive race for Congress. Allentown and the political stakes are high, including a competitive race for

Congress. Allentown and the Lehigh Valley has had a pretty strong economy for the state of Pennsylvania. We don't struggle as much with unemployment. We struggle more with labor availability. We keep saying that Pennsylvania is the swingiest of the swing states and Pennsylvania 7, which is this district, is the swingiest of the swing districts in Pennsylvania. I found a sign for the area's Democratic candidate, Congresswoman Susan Wild, on the wall of a local restaurant called La Cocina del Abuelo, or Grandpa's Kitchen.

It serves Central American fare, like tacos and tortas. Owner Greenberg Lemus is a citizen now, but he came to the US in 1991 from Guatemala after crossing the border illegally. I lived here in Pennsylvania for almost 33 years. Trump has called for the deportation of people who crossed into the country illegally, even those with pending asylum claims. He said he would start with criminals, and hasn't spoken specifically about how he would deport an estimated 9 million immigrants who came into the country since President Biden took office.

Greenberg thinks the U.S. should embrace the latest wave of immigrants. A report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the recent surge will create a modest drag on average wages for several years, but boost broader productivity over time. Immigrants also helped address a post-COVID labor shortage, a 2022 University of California study found. He wants to get everybody out of here. Who's going to do the job?

Who's going to do the hard work? We're doing this. What he's doing, pushing everybody different paths, instead of uniting us. I mean, Kalama Harris, she's doing a great job, I think. Even though the Lehigh Valley is more than 1,500 miles from the southern border, it's become a major issue in Congresswoman Wilde's re-election campaign. More on how that's shaking out after the break. Tired of capital gains taxes?

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LLC, member FINRA, SIPC, and advisory services provided by Affiliate, FREC Advisors, LLC, and SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Best found in town. There's hundreds of people out on the streets of La Jaden for the Halloween parade. You've got everybody marching from the Shriners to the local fire department to the high school band and politicians too. Ryan McKenzie is a state rep and a Republican running for US Congress. Happy Halloween guys. Anybody? for US Congress. Happy Halloween, guys. Anybody? Candy?

Here you go, happy Halloween. Mackenzie's run against Congresswoman Susan Wild is considered a toss-up, and it's attracted millions of dollars in outside spending and outsize attention. After he passed out his last pack of Skittles, Mackenzie stopped near a playground to discuss his race against Wild,

who was first elected in 2018. He said immigration is at the center of his campaign. Absolutely. It's a top-tier issue. We hear about it very often. I went down to the border and got to see it firsthand, and there are just wide-open stretches where the cartels are moving people in, and they're right. As a state lawmaker, McKenzie has sponsored bills cracking down on people who enter the

country illegally, including legislation that would require hospitals to report on ER visits. He said the U.S. needs to build a physical barrier at the southern border and get tough with people who crossed illegally. That is somebody who is here in the country illegally. They have now also committed another crime that they are being detained for. We should be deporting those individuals, absolutely, if they have committed a crime here in the country. Republicans have pointed to some high-profile incidents of criminal activity committed by people who have entered the country illegally,

including the murder of a nursing student in Georgia. They say any crime committed by someone in the U.S. illegally is a crime that shouldn't have been committed. In the aggregate, though, a national study by Stanford University of criminal cases found that immigrants, regardless of their status, are jailed at a lower rate than people born in the U.S. Wilde says Republican rhetoric about immigration is awful. I am completely in favor of a safe and secure border, but figure out who the real enemy is. It's not people searching for a better life.

Many voters, though, give Trump strong marks on immigration. A Wall Street Journal poll released last month found, by a 16-point margin, that voters in battleground states, including Pennsylvania, trust Trump more than Harris to handle immigration and border security. That split was evident in the people I spoke with at the parade. Listen, it's not legal immigration that's a problem. Okay?

It's the open border policy. Biden's policies really have a lot to do with people accepting that they can come over and not really, you know, not really having any rules about sending them back or vetting or anything like that. Immigration is important. I understand we don't want to just let everybody in, but also we have to treat people how we want to be treated. And you know, you can't...

That last voice was Rick Moyer, a 42-year-old father of six who works as a plumber. He's voting for Harris because he doesn't like Trump's demeanor, including his tone on immigration. You know, you can't assume just because they're coming, trying to make a better life, that there's something wrong with those people. So, you know, I don't just think that everybody should just walk in, but we also can't just be like, everybody go home.

Democrats' response to voter frustration on this issue is to point to a bipartisan bill unveiled in February that would have funded a border wall and more agents. It also would have established a new asylum process at the border to deliver fast case resolutions and swift deportations for migrants who don't qualify. My colleague Michelle Hackman explained that the bill was painstakingly negotiated for months but never passed. In that time, it sort of took on a life of its own,

where Republicans were able to sort of message about it and say, it's too generous. So that when it was released, within about an hour, Republicans and especially Trump came out and said, this feels too liberal. We need to walk away from it. And Trump was pretty explicit about it. He said, you know, this is an issue I want to campaign on.

— Democrats, including Wilde and Harris, have used that as a line of counterargument. — Donald Trump got on the phone, called up some folks in Congress, and said, kill the bill. And you know why? Because he'd prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem. — I met Wilde at a United Auto Workers Union Hall.

Local 677 represents employees of the Mack Truck plant in Allentown. The Congresswoman gave a speech that promised to stand up for workers and protect labor. This district was built on organized labor. Methlen steel, Mack trucks. She and other speakers said Republicans, including Trump, appointed officials who made it harder to organize and win concessions from companies.

But the biggest name at the rally wasn't wild. It was UAW President Sean Fain. He also made an economic argument in his speech, and afterward, he told me Democrats need to do a better job reframing the discussion about recent immigrants. They're trying to survive. And, you know, growing up, I heard these stories from my grandparents.

They were no different. They're blaming, you know, this person trying to cross a border as a reason why working class persons went behind over for decades. And we all know that's not the truth. The reason we went behind is because of people at the top are taking more.

Republicans frame things very, very differently. And no one does it like Donald Trump. We'll hear how after the break. This podcast is brought to you by Humber River Health Foundation. From the discovery of insulin in 1921 to the promise of universal health care in 1966, Canadians have always made health care our mission. Now we face our biggest challenge yet, a cure for health care.

Reduced wait times, safer patients, advancements in technology, the end of hallway medicine. We're finding it all here at Humber River Health. The Sunday in October when Donald Trump held a town hall in Lancaster was one of those perfect fall days, dry and mild with leaves rustling in the breeze. Vendors hawking mag of hats and shirts stood in the streets. Some Trump fans from Japan danced on a sidewalk. People enthusiastically lined up for several blocks to get into the convention center. One was Emil Ramirez, a 25-year-old whose family came from the Dominican Republic. He now runs a cleaning business in the city. This is my first time voting.

I registered Republican and I'm looking forward to stay like that forever. What's the big issue? What attracts you to? So, our thing is that, listen, our whole family came the right way. And we need to not be mixed up with the illegal immigrants that come in this country. Us Hispanics have been mixed with them for way too long and Donald Trump is going to stop that. Inside the convention center, it didn't take long for Trump to turn to the topic. And we had the lowest illegal immigration that we've had, I guess probably in history, certainly in recorded history. And it was going lower. topic. One person who was not there?

Jamie Arroyo, a Lancaster city councilman who told me he actively avoided going downtown that Sunday. The 36-year-old's family is from Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, and his grandfather first came to work on Lancaster area farms. Arroyo doesn't like the way Trump talks about immigrants, including times when the candidate has called them, quote, animals. I mean, quite frankly, it's disgusting, I think, to talk about other human beings in that way, in that nature, playing into people's fears, creating enemies of others is just, you know, I think they're lines out of a playbook that we have seen far

too many times in history that doesn't end well. Arroyo earlier this year led the city council in adopting a law to make Lancaster a quote welcoming city. That means officials won't ask people doing routine business about their immigration status, and cooperation with immigration enforcement authorities is restricted. Republicans who control the county government denounced the law, and then passed a resolution supporting work with federal immigration authorities. Josh Parsons, the Republican county commissioner, explained the move. We're a very pro-law enforcement county, but people are still worried about crime and they

want to know that the law is being enforced. At Trump's rally in Lancaster, screens displayed images of threatening men with face tattoos and olive skin, and he talked about the dangers of immigrants entering the country illegally. At a recent Trump rally in New York, a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as a, quote, floating island of garbage. The comment prompted backlash. Trump has distanced himself from the comic, and at a rally in Allentown just a week before the election, the former president had a response to protesters who gathered outside.

Nobody loves our Latino community and our Puerto Rican community more than I do. So where does this leave us? It was hard to find much middle ground on this topic in Pennsylvania. Republicans I spoke with generally said their concerns about illegal immigration weren't based on their day-to-day lives, but on what they've seen about other places on the news. They were a little less excited about another key part of Trump's platform, mass deportations. But they still expressed fear over how migrants would change their communities, creating something of a feedback loop.

Trump and other Republicans keep talking about the issue, and their advantage on it has grown. At the same time, widespread concerns about immigration and border control have put Democrats on defense. I found Harris supporters who said they understood the need for more border security and were concerned by the sheer scope of illegal crossing since 2020. But they were more likely to say immigrants who came here illegally should be given a chance to build new lives, rather than be deported. Perhaps because Harris and Democrats have been reluctant to lean into the stories of people

like restaurant owner Greenberg Lemus, it's clear Republicans have a political advantage on this issue. I thought of that while talking to Allentown's mayor, Matt Turk. In 2021, as voters elected him the city's first Latino mayor, they also voted to keep a law that required city business to be conducted in English only. I think there's, whenever you change, there's a friction associated with change. There's getting used to new neighbors and new ways of doing things, and for the new neighbors, there's getting them used to how we do things here.

But the beauty of this city is that they've integrated new arrivals and helped them understand this kind of Allentown way of life. Chasing the Vote is part of the Wall Street Journal's What's News. This episode was produced by Ariana Asperu and Jess Jupiter. Sound designed by Michael Laval. He also wrote our theme music. Editorial oversight from Joshua Jamerson, Philana Patterson, Ben Pershing, Scott Salloway, and Chris Zinsley. Special thanks to Kimberly S. Johnson. I'm Jimmy Vielkind. This was the last installment of Chasing the Vote. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to cast your ballot.