Chasing the Vote: How the Illegal-Immigration Debate Plays in Pennsylvania
22:24 Share

How can leaders leverage technology to strengthen customer experience, build lasting relationships, and drive competitive advantage? Learn more on the third episode of Techfluential, a podcast from Deloitte and custom content from WSJ. 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.

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 a 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 Vilkind, 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 2.5 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. 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 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 Wilde, 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 U.S. in 1991 from Guatemala after crossing the border illegally.

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.

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.

Your business deploys AI pilots everywhere. But are they going anywhere? Or are they stuck in silos, exhausting resources, unable to scale? Maybe you don't need hundreds of AI pilots. You need a holistic strategy.

IBM has 65,000 consultants with Gen AI expertise who can help you design, integrate, and optimize AI solutions. So you're not just deploying AI, you're scaling it across your business. Learn more at ibm.com slash consulting. IBM, let's create. There's hundreds of people out on the streets of Leiden for the annual Halloween parade.

You've got everybody marching from the Shriners to the local fire department to the high school band and politicians, too. Brian McKenzie is a state rep and a Republican running for U.S. Congress. Happy Halloween, guys. Anybody? Candy? There you go. Happy Halloween. McKenzie's run against Congresswoman Susan Wild is considered a toss-up, and it's attracted millions of dollars in outside spending and outsized attention.

After he passed out his last pack of Skittles, McKenzie stopped near a playground to discuss his race against Wilde, 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 they're 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. 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 bill is too liberal. We need to walk away from it. And Trump was pretty explicit about it. He said, you know, this is this is an issue I want to campaign on.

Democrats, including Wilde and Harris, have used that as a line of counter-argument. 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. Bethlehem 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 Wilde. 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 the border as a reason why a working class person went behind for decades.

And we all know that's not the truth. The reason we went behind is because the 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.

Why do over 50% of the Fortune 500 use Elastic? Because Elastic has done the hard work of making it easier for companies to do generative AI right. Elastic's Search AI helps them make insightful and impactful decisions at speed. Across search, observability, and security, Elastic has the power to take your data into the future. Explore the possibilities of AI with your data at explore.elastic.co. Elastic, the Search AI company.

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 MAGF 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.

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. And we're going to let people in. We won't have people come in, but they have to come in legally. We have to know they love our country. Trump is talking about immigration. And you can hear the crowd reaction. 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. Drug dealers, gang members, everybody. And if you look at Venezuela, if you look at a lot of these countries where they came from, they opened up their prisons and they allowed the people to come out. 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 in 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. Nobody. 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 crossings 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 is getting used to

Chasing the Vote is part of The Wall Street Journal's What's News. This episode was produced by Ariana Osberu and Jess Jupiter. Sound design by Michael LaValle. He also wrote our theme music.

Editorial oversight from Joshua Jamerson, Falana Patterson, Ben Pershing, Scott Salloway, and Chris Zinsley. Special thanks to Kimberly S. Johnson. I'm Jimmy Veilkind. This was the last installment of Chasing the Vote. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to cast your ballot.

Support for this podcast comes from Washington Wise, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Decisions made in Washington can affect your portfolio every day. But what policy changes should investors be watching? How might the 2024 election affect your trading and investments? Washington Wise is an original podcast from Charles Schwab that unpacks the stories making news in Washington and how they may impact your finances and portfolio.

Listen today at schwab.com slash Washington Wise. That's schwab.com slash Washington Wise.