Earlier this month, Pennsylvania state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R) repeatedly found herself challenging anti-immigrant rhetoric from the leader of her party and his allies.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, had isolated Charleroi, Pa., in Bartolotta\u2019s district as an example of the sort of place under threat from Haitian immigrants. Responding on Facebook, Bartolotta rejected that idea, noting that the immigrants had \u201cescaped horrific events in Haiti\u201d \u2014 a place Trump has disparaged \u2014 and were \u201chere LEGALLY to WORK , and pay taxes, and raise their children, and be part of the community.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then Libs of TikTok, a social media account that has gained notoriety by mocking the left, promoted a misleading video of Haitian immigrants in the town. Bartolotta again weighed in.<\/p>\n
\u201cI follow you & repost but you are playing into the hands of people who are jeopardizing the safety of innocent children in our local school,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThese Haitians are working hard, sending their children to school and opening businesses. They are here legally. They did not cross our border. Many are professionals who escaped horrific conditions in their home country.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Libs of TikTok account responded by accusing her of having \u201cblasted Trump\u201d by pointing out that his rhetoric was wrong.<\/p>\n
Trump was similarly unchastened. At a rally in nearby Indiana, Pa., on Monday, he again singled out Charleroi as an example of the putative perils of immigration.<\/p>\n
\u201cCharleroi, Pennsylvania, has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the population of their town,\u201d he said. \u201cDo you know that, right?\u201d He turned his attention to several people in the audience who had cheered at the mention of their town. \u201cHas your town changed slightly?\u201d he asked them with cynical understatement, receiving an affirmative reply.<\/p>\n
Speaking of Springfield, Ohio, at another point in his comments \u2014 a city that had been the target of baseless claims disparaging Haitian arrivals by him and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) \u2014 Trump outlined the fate that awaits these immigrants should he win this November\u2019s election.<\/p>\n
\u201cKamala has illegally flown in more than a half a million migrants,\u201d he said, referring to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. This claim isn\u2019t true; there is a program through which migrants who meet certain requirements can be sponsored for entry to the U.S. on flights they pay for themselves.<\/p>\n
Trump turned away from the teleprompter.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight? When she was saying, no, no, we don\u2019t want to do that,\u201d Trump said to the audience. \u201cThese guys actually want these people in our country. It\u2019s not even believable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Back to the teleprompter: \u201c\u2014 working with left-wing nonprofits to inundate Pennsylvania communities, changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will never be the same,\u201d he said, again speaking off the cuff. \u201cThey will never be. Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? I don\u2019t think \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
A man in the audience yelled out: \u201cSend them back!\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact is,\u201d Trump continued, \u201cand I\u2019ll say it now: You have to get \u2019em the hell out. You have to get them out. I\u2019m sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n
The crowd cheered. Trump claimed that \u201cthey\u2019ve destroyed it.\u201d The crowd broke out into a chant: \u201cSend them back! Send them back!\u201d<\/p>\n
Again, these are immigrants who are in the country legally, and, as Bartolotta noted, people simply seeking new lives and new opportunities in safety. But Trump calls for these legal arrivals to be deported simply because they are \u201cchanging the character of small towns\u201d \u2014 a phrase that reflects his political focus on halting America\u2019s slowly changing demography. It\u2019s a phrase, too, that reflects his implicit position that White conservative America is the real America and the one worth defending.<\/p>\n
The challenge is that many such places are withering. In her response to Libs of TikTok, Bartolotta made this point explicitly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed them,\u201d she wrote on X. \u201cHe advertised and looked for workers for a long time. Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and LEGAL to work in his facility. Instead of closing, he now has three shifts working around the clock.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a pattern in a lot of small communities in the United States: The population is disproportionately old, aged out of the workforce. There are relatively few young people who can fill now-vacant jobs, causing employers to shrink. This shift in age is a central reason foreign-born workers have seen higher job growth recently, something else that Trump frames in exaggerated, apocalyptic terms.<\/p>\n
We can see how this shift affects Trump-voting areas more heavily thanks to data from the Census Bureau. In counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the median age is 39.1 years. In counties that voted for Trump four years ago, it\u2019s 42.2. In Biden counties, an average of about 17 percent of the population is age 65 or over, compared to a fifth of Trump-voting counties.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a metric that looks at the ratio of elderly to working-age residents. In Biden-voting counties, there are about 29 people age 65 and over for every 100 people of working age. In Trump-voting counties, it\u2019s nearly 36 \u2014 meaning more people who are drawing down on resources than paying income taxes.<\/p>\n
In rural Republican-voting counties, the numbers are more stark. The average age is slightly higher and there are slightly more people age 65 and over. The same holds for Washington County, Pa., where Charleroi sits: It is older and has a higher elderly-to-working-age ratio than other Republican-voting counties on average.<\/p>\n
Immigrants can \u2014 and, as Bartolotta notes, do \u2014 fill that gap. But not often. Analysis published by Bloomberg this month showed that immigrants to the United States predominantly settle in blue counties with vibrant economies. That\u2019s in part because of those economies and in part because immigrants have long been drawn to cities with large communities from their home countries.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s pledge to deport the immigrants who defy that trend, settling in small towns in economically struggling area, is obviously toxic and demagogic. His campaign is centered on presenting immigrants as dangerous and antithetical to America (which history quickly reveals as false). It\u2019s part of his broader focus on stoking his supporters\u2019 fear of change in any form, particularly change that overlaps with race. <\/p>\n
This particular argument, though, is also damaging to those supporters. The handful of rally attendees from Charleroi might be anguished by seeing Black immigrants around town, but their state senator, at least, recognizes how the town benefits from those immigrants\u2019 presence. Even setting aside the basic issues of empathy, having immigrants who want to keep local industries open is better for a region than having those industries close because there aren\u2019t enough people to fill the positions.<\/p>\n
Unless, of course, you\u2019re Donald Trump and you are trying to win an election by portraying dark-skinned immigrants as dangerous and divisive, pledging to uproot them. His supporters might cheer as the recent legal arrivals seeking a new, better life are forced to return to Haiti. They might then wonder, a few months later, why their dying towns continue to hollow out.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Pennsylvania state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R) repeatedly found herself challenging anti-immigrant rhetoric from the leader of her party and his allies. Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, had isolated Charleroi, Pa., in Bartolotta\u2019s district as an example of the sort of place under threat from Haitian immigrants. Responding on Facebook, Bartolotta […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":10036,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10035"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10035\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}