It’s easy to get away with lying about immigrants when your audience has never met one.
[A]ccording to a new working paper by Jonathon Rothwell, senior economist at Gallup, the voters cheering, clapping, and nodding in agreement at Trump’s speeches aren’t likely to be interacting with racial or ethnic minorities or immigrants on a regular basis: The best predictor of whether a person supports a Trump presidency is how white their neighborhood is.
Trump’s entire campaign is based upon his supporters’ fear of ethnic minorities, mostly Latino and Hispanic, specifically the fear that these people of a certain color are taking away jobs from “real Americans,” spreading horrendous crimes, or other similar contrived right-wing horseshit. This is the core of his appeal, a theme to which he returns again and again, in speech after speech, rally after rally. It is the glue that binds his supporters together. As The Atlantic reminds us:
Donald Trump’s foreign policy speech Monday was like a menacing kidnapper’s note, with out-of-context snippets of news stories, half-truths, and full-fledged lies arranged to spell out a familiar threat: immigrants.
Knowing full well that the corporate media wouldn’t call him out on his duplicity after he obligingly preened and mouthed platitudes with a weak, gullible Mexican President, there was a very good reason Trump went back into full-blown Gestapo mode the minute he touched back down on American soil this week. Confronted with an Obama economy boasting 4.9% unemployment and unprecedented job creation, his latest handlers know he desperately needs to keep his base scared of something. Fortunately for Trump, the available data show there is plenty to work with:
Trump supporters, recent polling has shown, are disproportionately fearful. They fear crime and terror far more than other Americans; they are also disproportionately wary of foreign influence and social change. (They are not, however, any more likely than other Americans to express economic anxiety.)
The polling bears this out:
Trump supporters are more concerned than most. According to data provided by the Public Religion Research Institute, 65 percent of Trump supporters feared being victims of terrorism, versus 51 percent of all Americans. Three-fourths of Trump supporters feared being victims of crime, versus 63 percent overall. Trump supporters also disproportionately feared foreign influence: 83 percent said the American way of life needed to be protected from it, versus 55 percent overall.
But the real reason that Trump is able to scare his supporters into believing all sorts of ridiculous garbage about undocumented immigrants is that his fantastical and twisted caricatures are literally all most of them will ever know. As Gallup’s Economist, Jonathon Rockwell found, the key common denominator among Trump supporters was not some imagined “economic anxiety” (Trump supporters are no more “anxious” about their economic status than anyone else) but the fact that they all, for the most part, haled from lily-white neighborhoods where they’ve never had to deal with the reality that Americans are now just a more diverse population than they might like:
Rothwell found that pro-Trump folks tend to live in neighborhoods that are super white—sometimes, whiter than the wider regions they live in. “People living in zip codes with disproportionately high shares of white residents are significantly and robustly more likely to view Trump favorably,” Rothwell writes in the paper. “Those living in zip codes with overall diversity that is low relative to their commuting zone are also far more likely to view Trump favorably.” (So, white suburbanites in a diverse metros would qualify.)
Drawing on eighty-seven thousand interviews in the Gallup organizations’s polling database, Rothwell found that Trump’s support increases the farther his supporters live from the country of Mexico, or indeed from anyone of Latino or Hispanic heritage. Conversely, “a person is less likely to be a Trump supporter if they have a person of color as their neighbor:”
What these findings mean, Rothwell concludes, is that support for Trump’s nativism has a lot to do with ignorance about immigrants and minorities, which in turn has a lot to do with residential segregation. “Limited interactions with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and college graduates may contribute to prejudicial stereotypes, political and cultural misunderstandings, and a general fear of rejection and not-belonging,” he writes.
The closest most of Trump’s supporters have come to actually interacting with an undocumented immigrant is likely to have been driving by their neighbor’s property and seeing some young Hispanic or Latino men mowing the lawn. Or glancing in the back of a fast-food restaurant and seeing someone with brown skin washing the dishes. Or perhaps driving by a huge, faraway field of soybeans, fruits nuts or vegetables in Central California and seeing hundreds of shapes bent over in the hot sun, pulling up plants (half of all crop farm workers in the U.S. are “unauthorized” and have annual incomes of $5600 or less). But given their residential (and consequently, their social and workplace) surroundings, they sure aren’t getting their so-called “knowledge” firsthand. Instead, they’re simply being fed a steady diet of hysterical fearmongering and blame-placing that has reached its apotheosis in the persona of Donald Trump.
In short, Trump’s base of support, the people whom he tries to manipulate through appeals to nativism and repeated demonization of undocumented immigrants, are people who don’t have any real experience at all with such immigrants, or, indeed, with anyone of a different race. They are simply swallowing the swill Trump is spooning out to them, without any empirical frame of reference beyond what they hear on the TV and read about on the Internet. Meanwhile, those who have actual experience with people of other races --documented or undocumented—are far less susceptible to someone like Trump.
This election, more than any other in history, is shaping up to be a test of the amount of sheer ignorance that the country is able to withstand.