Even Hispanic Voters Have Had Enough of Illegal Immigration

In 2016, Hispanic voters gave Donald Trump 34% of the vote. Trump did even better in 2020 with 39% of the vote.

In 2024, Trump is poised for a breakthrough with Hispanic voters. Working-class Hispanics and blacks are flocking to the Republican candidate in unprecedented numbers. 

What’s changed? Republicans have been saying for years that the culturally conservative Hispanics are natural GOP voters, but it never played out that way on election day.

Today, it’s more than cultural conservatism that’s driving Hispanics to Trump and the GOP. “GOP consultant Mike Madrid tells Axios the political shift among working-class Latino and Black voters has accelerated in recent elections because they see Democrats as out of touch with their way of life.”

The push to forgive college loan debt is not popular among working-class Americans. And the EV mandates are not going over well with minority voters. “These are the new Reagan Democrats. They’re at the country music festivals, not the country clubs,” Madrid said.

Perhaps not surprisingly then, a majority of Hispanics are now in favor of the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, according to a YouGov poll conducted this month.

Newsweek:

Notably, the poll found that mass deportation was popular with Hispanics, with 53 percent saying they would favor such a program and 47 percent saying they would oppose it. White people were more supportive of mass deportations, with 67 percent saying they would back the program, and 33 percent saying they would oppose it. Among Black people, it was 47 percent in favor and 53 percent opposed.

An Axios poll published in April also found that a majority of Americans support the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including 45 percent of Latinos who were in favor of such a measure.

The results of the latest survey indicate that many would back former President Donald Trump’s plan to launch the largest deportation operation in U.S. history if he wins back the White House in November.

“In the absence of good governance, what people then resort to is that the pendulum will swing the other way and opt for the alternative which is a more restrictive approach,” Daniel Garza, president of the grassroots Latino advocacy group LIBRE Initiative told the New York Post.

Related: ICE Non-Detained Docket Is Now Over 7 Million

But what does Trump mean by “mass deportation”? How would it be accomplished? As it turns out, a far smaller number of people support the means that would have to be employed to accomplish “mass deportation.”

Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, U.K., says that the polls reflect the voter’s frustration with the lack of immigration enforcement.

“Showing papers on-demand. Racial profiling. A huge increase in the number and scale of ICE raids. But the polling is reflective of just how dissatisfied American voters are with the failure of both Republicans and Democrats to secure the border. Immigration is again surging to the top of the ‘most important problem’ list because Washington has shown itself completely ill-equipped to execute common-sense immigration enforcement.”

And then there’s the cost of deporting millions of people who are important cogs in the economy, as well as breaking up families.

“If voters knew the true cost of mass deportations, including breaking up families, hurting our economy, and the fiscal cost of detaining immigrants before they get deported, they would realize that mass deportation is not the answer to our broken immigration system,” Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School, told Newsweek.

The United States has as much right to say who comes in and who must go as any other nation on earth. If you don’t follow the rules, there are consequences.

But the reality is that mass deportation won’t work. What about the 5 million people waiting for a court hearing? What about families with some legal and some illegal members? Should they all be kicked out? What if the countries these people left refuse to take them back?

The fact is, this would be a horrendously complicated government program that would be needlessly cruel and massively expensive.