The Rhineland is closer to the Arctic Circle than Mexico, so it’s no big surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin town have laid eyes on the foreign migrants. donald trump claims are “invading” the country across the US border, 1,500 miles to the south.
But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is sure they are a big problem and is voting accordingly.
“We don’t see immigrants here, but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s it Biden. He is responsible.
Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find, as they look to cities like Chicago and New York that are struggling to deal with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals. transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.
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Trump has been pushing hard on fears about record levels of migration in Wisconsin, where the last two presidential elections were decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette Law School poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created an uncontrolled illegal migration crisis for the country.”
Trump has twice held rallies in Wisconsin in the past month, in which migrants have been a primary target. In Green Bay he called the issue “bigger than a war” and invoked the situation in Whitewater, a small town of about 15,000 inhabitants in the south of the state.
Republican politicians have made Whitewater the poster child for anti-immigration rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal assistance to deal with the arrival of nearly 1,000 people from Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past two years.
Meyer made it clear in a letter to President Joe Biden said in December he was not hostile to foreign arrivals as he expressed concern about the “terrible living conditions” suffered by some.
“We saw a family living in a 3 x 3 meter shed in temperatures of minus 10 degrees,” he wrote.
But the police chief said his department was having difficulty dealing with the number of Spanish-speaking migrants due to the cost of translation software and the time needed to deal with a sharp increase in unlicensed drivers. Meyer also said his officers responded to serious incidents linked to the arrivals, including the death of a child, sexual assault and a kidnapping.
However, he told Biden that “none of this information is shared as a way to denigrate or defame this group of people… In fact, we see great value in the growing diversity this group brings to our community.”
That hasn’t stopped Republican politicians from attacking Whitewater to incite fear.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a close Trump ally who has spoken at the former president’s political rallies, and a Republican member of Congress from the state, Bryan Steil, held a meeting in the city to denounce what they described as the “devastating” consequences of the arrival of migrants.
Johnson blamed “the whole issue on the flood of illegal immigrants who have come into this country under the Biden administration.”
Steil refused to support Meyer’s call for federal financial assistance and said the answer lay in legislation to secure the border. However, the congressman was among the Republicans who killed a bipartisan border security law after Trump opposed the legislation, in an apparent move to keep the crisis a live political issue until the presidential election.
Republican members of the Wisconsin legislature he wrote to Biden in January demanding action over what they claimed was a rise in violent crime in Whitewater, although Meyer said he sees no threat to residents from migrants and that “we are a safe community.”
Some Whitewater residents are furious about the political intervention. Brienne Brown, a city council member for six years, said residents have welcomed the migrants, with community organizations providing food, furniture and bedding for many.
“The spotlight fell on us because Ron Johnson and Bryan Steil decided to make this a political event for themselves. Most people here were incredibly angry. They feel like they were used as a political football,” she said.
“The crime that is occurring is extremely low level, which primarily consists of our police department stopping someone in a car who does not have a driver’s license.”
The police chief has called for migrants to be able to get driver’s licenses, but the Wisconsin legislature won’t allow it.
Brown said the serious assault incidents involved domestic violence, as well as the case of a woman who abandoned her newborn baby in a field, and that these types of crimes remain uncommon.
Wisconsin has long depended on migrant workers, many of them undocumented, as agricultural labor. Studies have suggested that the state’s dairy farms would grind to a halt without foreign workers. Historically, most were from Mexico. Whitewater tended to attract people from Guanajuato, as migrants from the Mexican state sent messages about job opportunities.
Brown noticed a change during the Covid crisis.
“I went door-to-door a lot just to talk to my voters during the pandemic. I started to notice that many of them were not from Mexico. They were from Nicaragua and Venezuela,” she said.
Brown said workers moved into accommodation left by students forced to return home due to the pandemic lockdown.
“We have a lot of farms, a lot of chicken farms, a lot of egg farms. There are factories that make seasonings, there are factories that can make food. They are always looking for low-wage workers and never have enough. So there was a lot of work available,” she said.
Schuh, like many other Americans critical of what they describe as Biden’s open borders policy, is keen to distinguish between those who go through the formal immigration process with a visa and those who cross the border to seek asylum or work illegally.
“I have nothing against immigrants, but this has to be done the right way,” he said.
Related: Trump divides Republican voters as friends and family clash: ‘We don’t talk’
Trump continued to stoke the issue at a rally in Michigan earlier this month when he blamed Biden for the murder of Ruby Garcia in March. The former president claimed that his government had deported the man who confessed to the shooting, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and that “corrupt Joe Biden took him back and let him in and let him stay and he cruelly killed Ruby.” Ortiz-Vite was deported in 2020 after being arrested for drinking and driving. It is unclear when he returned to the US.
Trump said at the rally that he spoke with Garcia’s family and that they were “mourning this incredible young woman.” But Garcia’s sister, Mavi, denied that anyone in the family had spoken to the former president and accused him of exploiting the murder for political purposes.
“He didn’t speak to any of us, so it was kind of shocking to see that he had said he had spoken to us and misinform people on live TV,” she said. told WOOD-TV.
“It’s always been about illegal immigrants. No one really talks about when Americans commit heinous crimes, and it’s kind of shocking why he only mentioned illegal ones. What about Americans who commit heinous crimes like this?”
