The Antimigrants
Many Trump voters have rejected their own heritage of mobility
Donald Trump’s supporters are anti-immigrant; at least that’s what we’re told. I’m pretty sure most statements about a group of people numbering in the millions are false from the start, but, in general, the more anti-immigrant you are, the more likely you are to vote for Donald Trump.
Not only are Trump’s supporters more likely to take anti-immigration stances, but they are also skeptical of free trade and U.S. involvement in world problems.
If we add to these facts the geographical reality of Trump support, then an even deeper picture of many Trump supporters starts to emerge.
Trump supporters disproportionately come from two major intersecting areas of the eastern United States: the Rust Belt and Appalachia. The Rust Belt runs from upstate New York west through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and parts of Michigan, and it ends near northern Illinois and eastern Wisconsin. Appalachia runs from southern New York down to the northern parts of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. These two regions don’t account for all of Trump’s support, but they are much heavier in support of The Donald than the rest of the United States.
Why does this matter?
It matters because these are the areas of the country that have been dying in certain ways for the last few decades. Manufacturing jobs, factory towns, the industrial American Dream, white working-class families; all these things have been on the decline in recent years, and it isn’t pretty. These regions are dying in many ways, and they are also the areas where Trump voters, who have serious problems with many aspects of immigration and internationalism, live in the highest concentrations. Why is this overlap between anti-immigration sentiment and a dying white working-class industrial culture significant? Kevin D. Williamson of the National Review Online helps explain:
There are some desperately poor places in these United States, in the rural South, true, but also within walking distance of Fifth Avenue. My own experience in Appalachia and the South Bronx suggests that the best thing that people trapped in poverty in these undercapitalized and dysfunctional communities could do is — move. Get the hell out of Dodge, or Eastern Kentucky, or the Bronx. Cheap moralizing of the sort that Theroux engages in, or the cheap sentimentalism that informs the Trump-Buchanan-Sanders view of globalization — “globalization” being another way of saying “human cooperation” — helps exactly no one. We spend a great deal of money trying to help poor people in backwards communities go to college; we’d probably get better results if we spent 20 percent of that helping them go to Midland, Texas, or Williamsport, Pa., or San Jose, Calif., where they’re paying delivery drivers $25 an hour to bring people their fruity gluten-free lunches. Send them to Marysville, Ohio, where they can build high-tech supercars in the employ of the wily Japanese.
In other words, many of the Trump voters living in these areas aren’t just anti-immigrant, they’re anti-migrant. Not only do they resent the ways in which the world has invaded the United States, but they refuse to lower themselves by becoming migrants themselves. This is entirely consistent when you think about it. Many of these people don’t want to move, nor do they admire those who are willing to move to make their own lives and the lives of their children better. They are entirely within their rights to do so, there are many arguments against moving, and the way that many government benefits are tied to geography doesn’t help. But here’s the issue no one is talking about:
People in the United States who choose government handouts in the place they grew up over moving somewhere else to work hard, perhaps in a new industry that requires some re-training, are rejecting their own heritage. Every white person in the United States descends from people who decided to migrate, whether for economic, religious, cultural, or personal reasons. The Rust Belt would never have existed without this kind of personal sacrifice and risk-taking by Germans and Pols and Italians and others, and Appalachia would have millions of people fewer if the Scots and Irish had just accepted their lots and waited for their towns and farms and families to die. If moving was not to much to ask of Nana or Great Grandpap, then why is it too much for Trump voters living in dying towns today?
Perhaps the old quote attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli helps explain:
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Perhaps for the families of many of these Trump voters the spiritual truth of pilgrimage, the courage to move one’s entire life and leave the people you love, the liberty to build a new life, and the abundance that came with it have led to selfishness, complacency, apathy, dependence, and bondage. There are good reasons for staying in the place your family is from, for holding on to the bonds of place and kinship, but for Americans, those bonds only exist the way they do because our ancestors decided to risk breaking their own ties to the past in search of a better future (not to mention that technological advances and geographical realities make our potential moves much less dramatic or risky then those of our forbears).
In the final analysis, if we are too good to move, if we believe we deserve better than to become migrants, if we look down on immigrants and those who leave their homes for the chance at something better, then we reject our own past, our own heritage, even the blood that runs through our own veins. If we not only oppose the migration of others, but embody it ourselves, our bonds of place become a bondage of complacency.
