The Trump Paradox

Migration, Trade, and Racial Politics in US-Mexico Integration

Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda, Edward Telles

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780520972513
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Trump Paradox: Migration, Trade, and Racial Politics in US-Mexico Integration explores one of the most complex and unequal cross-border relations in the world, in light of both a twenty-first-century political economy and the rise of Donald Trump. Despite the trillion-plus dollar contribution of Latinos to the US GDP, political leaders have paradoxically stirred racial resentment around immigrants just as immigration from Mexico has reached net zero. With a roster of state-of-the-art scholars from both Mexico and the US, The Trump Paradox explores a dilemma for a divided nation such as the US: in order for its economy to continue flourishing, it needs immigrants and trade.

PART ONE

The Trump Paradox

CHAPTER 1

How Do We Explain Trump’s Paradoxical Yet Electorally Successful Use of a False US-Mexico Narrative?

RAÚL HINOJOSA-OJEDA AND EDWARD TELLES

Much has been made of early studies that tried to equate Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 with voters who had been hard hit by free trade policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and by job competition and social disintegration created by an increase in immigration—even though the actual economic and social impacts of Mexico-related trade and migration were not considered. In this chapter, we introduce (nonalternative) facts about Mexican migration and trade policies and compare the Trump narrative about how Mexican migration and trade have hurt the United States to actual economic and social exposure to Mexican trade and immigration. We focus on the following questions and hypotheses:

1. Was support for Trump based on the actual local presence of immigrants and trade, particularly from Mexico?

2. If we do not find that places with more trade and immigration predict Trump support, then is it attitudes about trade and immigration that predict Trump support instead? We thus open up the possibility that Trump may have tapped into attitudes about these rather than their actual impact.

3. Or perhaps both are operative: Trump support reflects negative attitudes about immigration and trade as well as a greater presence of immigration and trade, suggesting that negative attitudes would be a response to a greater local threat of immigration and trade.

4. Finally, does Trump support correlate with poorer socioeconomic conditions, and if so, how are these related to trade and immigration?

Our research shows the existence of a Trump Paradox. That is, while counties that voted for Trump are often struggling economically, with high concentrations of poverty and unemployment, and have negative attitudes about immigration and trade, these counties—paradoxically—have little exposure to immigration or trade with Mexico.

THE FALSE US-MEXICO NARRATIVE

From the launch of his campaign in June 2015, Donald Trump adeptly focused on US-Mexico relations to create a media narrative that America ceased being great because of border-raiding illegal immigrants (“murderers and rapists”) and trade agreements like NAFTA that ship US jobs across the border (Green 2017). In this narrative, “real” American working people are hurt because America’s border is being overrun by Mexico sending their worst people and because of “unfair” trade deals made by our “bad” leaders. This diagnosis leads to the magical solution that he can “Make America Great Again” by building a “big, beautiful wall,” deporting millions, dismantling NAFTA, and imposing huge tariffs. “We have no choice,” Trump says. “If we don’t defend our borders, then we cease to be a nation.” He has since continued to use this narrative with great success among his political base.

The dog whistle of this simply construed yet dangerously fictitious cross-border narrative—not to mention the full-throated denunciations of Mexicans and Central Americans—should not have been underestimated, especially given Trump’s openly racist demonizing, unprecedented in modern presidential campaigns. His narrative of nostalgia, forged as it is by white ethnic identity politics, invokes a long historical legacy of privileged supremacy but with a twist. In this telling of the story it is an “embattled” white citizenry that must make a stand or be swallowed up by a demographic transformation to a nonwhite-dominant multiracial America. Trump’s claim that “this is our last chance”—his presidential campaign’s forthright appeal for a white backlash—should have made clear what was at stake for American democracy in the twenty-first century.

The collective failure by the media and political leaders to immediately counter not only the blatant bigotry of his initial position but also its manifest economic absurdity allowed Trump to elaborate a twenty-first century nativism based on anti-immigrant politics and similar to the nativist movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century, where “native-born” whites decried the upsurge in immigration from the “undesirables” of that day, painting the desperate immigrants from southern Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Eastern Europe with ugly ethnic stereotypes and slurs. Then as now, Trump’s nativist narrative insults immigrants, particularly Mexicans, with calls for deporting all undocumented immigrants and their US-born children and making Mexico pay for the wall by seizing family remittances to Mexico. Today, the narrative is augmented by vilifying international trade, especially from Mexico, the same country that the despised immigrants come from. Trade policies promoted by Trump’s narrative include voiding NAFTA and imposing tariffs as coercive threats around migration and trade.

Journalists, political leaders, and academics have sought to explain Trump’s political rise, initially accepting at face value Trump’s claim that immigration and the global economy threaten American workers. Journalists accepted preliminary scholarship suggesting that this was the basis for the popularity of his appeal and his electoral victory in key swing states (Davis and Hilsenrath 2016).¹ These journalists wrongly inferred that attitudes about immigration and trade were the result of actual immigration and trade, conflating these attitudes with the wrong-headed idea that Trump supporters had experienced negative impacts from both migration and US trade in a global economy.

Scholars have continued to debate the causes of Trump’s or other nationalist candidates’ unexpected electoral victory using a variety of techniques. Some economists use data on temporally specific regional impacts, looking for correlations between the “China shock” of increased imports in the early 2000s and voting that swung for Trump in 2016 (Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2016; Autor et al. 2016). Chinese import penetration was also found to be a predictor of the rise of right-wing candidates and nationalism in Europe (Colantone and Stanig 2018). Other economists find a correlation between the decline in manufacturing employment and the counties that voted for Trump (Altik, Atkeson, and Hansen 2018). Prevailing theory in political science and journalistic readings of social science data expected that economic interests and support for Trump were positively correlated (Mutz 2018).

However, the political communication scholar Diana Mutz (2018), in a paper backed by the National Academy of Sciences, uses the leading election panel surveys and disputes the perceived economic interest explanation, instead finding that attitudes concerning white status were a better explanation for Trump’s victory. In particular, candidate Trump was able to tap into white voter anxiety about globalization and diversity. Specifically, concerns and anxieties about immigration and job displacement predicted greater support for Trump (Mutz 2018). A careful reanalysis of those same data concludes that the status threat explanation was overstated; indeed, perceptions of economic interests were at least as important, and perceived economic interests are intertwined with status issues (Morgan 2018). The political scientists Marc Hooghe and Ruth Dassonneville (2018), who study electoral behavior, found that anti-immigrant attitudes and racial resentments explained much of the Trump vote, though neither they nor any of the other authors mentioned explored the actual impact of immigration or trade.

Economic Self-Interest, Anti-Immigrant Attitudes, and Racial Resentments

Our research demonstrates that using data on actual Mexican trade and migration impacts challenges both the economic and the attitudinal-based explanations for Trump support. It shows the existence of a Trump Paradox that exposes dual yet systematic contradictions between Trump voter behavior and actual county economic exposure to Mexican trade and immigration, as well as contradictions between the attitudinally perceived economic and social impacts compared to actual economic and social exposure to Mexican trade and immigration. We do, however, confirm that places that voted for Trump are more economically challenged by unemployment and poverty than others. Yet these challenging economic conditions are unrelated to exposure to Mexican trade and immigration.

Arguments for the importance of attitudes rather than real self-interest are based on sociological and political science research. Work in group position theory, for example, posits that increases in the size of a given racial minority group can be seen as a group threat to political and social resources by the majority, triggering the fear that immigrants pose a potential challenge to the dominance of the white majority and generating hostility and negative stereotyping of the minority group (Blalock 1967; Hood and Morris 1997; Quillian 1995). Because of the growing Latino population across the United States (Krogstad and Lopez 2015), Latinos, and Mexicans in particular, may be perceived as a major threat to the white majority, especially when those fears are activated by political candidates.

Similarly, growing trade may threaten whites by challenging their sense of not only racial but also global supremacy. In this way, white Americans situate themselves as the “real” Americans in a world where “America’s” global leadership is at stake. On the other hand, white anxieties and negative attitudes about immigration and trade may be stirred up by political actors. These actors activate latent racial hostilities (Hopkins 2010; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002) as well as a preference for like-minded candidates (Mendelberg 2001), independent of actual immigration and trade.

Trump uses nationalist rhetoric to tie poor economic conditions to globalization and diversity (Monnat 2016; Rothwell and Diego-Rosell 2016), but this rhetoric obfuscates the deeper underlying dynamics of high unemployment and low income by falsely blaming trade and immigration for the economic challenges of unemployment and poverty. Our research shows that the challenging economic conditions in much of Trump country are real but are unrelated to local exposure to Mexican trade and immigration. We examine the actual volume of trade and immigration rather than simply attitudes about immigration and trade. As far as we know, no one has examined the effect of actual immigration and trade on the 2016 election, and the only paper that has examined trade flows (goods and services that are bought and sold between countries) is that by the labor economist David Autor and colleagues (2016) on Chinese imports. In particular, we focus on trade and immigration from Mexico, which has been particularly vilified by Trump’s campaign and his presidency as a primary source of the nation’s economic and social ills.

DATA AND METHODS: TRUMP SUPPORT, TRADE, AND IMMIGRATION

We analyze data at the county and congressional district (macro) and individual (micro) levels. We use county and congressional district data from the US Census and the American Community Survey, in addition to sources we indicate belo...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. The Trump Paradox
• Part Two. Mexico-US Migration
• Part Three. Trade Integration
• IV. Racial Politics
• List of Acronyms
• Notes
• Glossary of Key Terms
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index