Former President Donald Trump’s hardline rhetoric on immigration appears unlikely to cost him or the GOP much support among Florida’s Hispanic voters in November. It might even help them.
With Republicans accusing President Joe Biden and his administration of failing to enforce basic immigration laws and secure the U.S. southern border, the issue of immigration is particularly complicated in Miami-Dade, where more than half of the county’s residents were born abroad.
Though nationally Hispanic voters are more likely to side with Democrats on immigration, a notable number of Florida’s Hispanic voters — many of whom are immigrants themselves — see illegal immigration as a pervasive problem for the U.S., according to public polling. That could help Republicans win over even more support in a voter-rich part of Florida that has shifted rightward in recent years, or at least minimize any damage.
A recent survey of Hispanic voters in 22 states conducted by Florida International University and the marketing firm Adsmovil found that almost half (45%) of Hispanic voters in the U.S. believe Democrats have the best handle on immigration issues, with just 29% saying that Republicans are better on the issue. But when the survey asked the same question of Florida’s Hispanic voters, the results were flipped.
“There’s this perception among those that are here that the boat is full,” Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at FIU who led the university’s poll, said Thursday night during a Hispanic voter town hall hosted at the university by the Miami Herald, WLRN, Univision and CBS-4. “Will someone pull the ladder up?”
Gamarra’s survey also found that, both nationally and in Florida, Hispanic voters are most likely to identify immigration and “open borders” as the biggest threat to the country’s national security.
Another panelist at Thursday’s town hall, Irina Vilariño, whose family launched the popular Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine chain of restaurants after coming to the U.S. during a mass wave of Cubans in 1980, agreed that Miami’s Hispanic voters are worried about the historic influx of migrants coming to the border, but disagreed with Gamarra’s characterization as to why.
Vilariño, a former Republican congressional candidate, said the GOP simply wants “good people to come to the United States.”
“I am not against immigration,” she said. “On the contrary. We need great immigration for our businesses, for our economy.”
Trump has sought to elevate the crisis at the U.S. southern border as he vies to reclaim control of the White House this year. But in doing so, he’s also deployed rhetoric that is widely seen as anti-immigrant.
At a campaign stop in New Hampshire in December, he insisted that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. During a rally in Hialeah in November, Trump drew cheers when he promised to launch the biggest domestic deportation campaign in history.
Nelson Diaz, a Republican lobbyist and former chairman of the Miami-Dade GOP, brushed off Trump’s remarks, saying that the former president isn’t “against legal immigration,” but is simply acknowledging that “the disaster that’s occurring on the southern border is unacceptable.”
“The biggest mistake that a lot of people make is assuming that when Donald Trump talks about closing the border and that kind of stuff, he’s saying he hates immigrants or anyone that’s foreign born, and that’s just not true,” Diaz said.
Perspectives driven by politics
Despite Miami’s vast foreign-born population and unique political culture, some experts said that the immigration debate in South Florida is still largely driven at the national level.
Guillermo Grenier, a professor of sociology at FIU who studies immigration, said that the country’s hyper-polarized political environment has made it difficult to separate voters’ attitudes toward immigration from their party affiliation.
While Cuban Americans — a traditionally Republican-leaning voting bloc that has dominated Miami-Dade politics for decades — tend to be sympathetic to migrants fleeing their countries of origin for political reasons, he said, many of those voters have toed the Republican Party line in the immigration debate.
“They’re thinking about the politics of it,” Grenier said. “The politics of it is: ‘We’re not in power and we want to be. We’re Republicans, we want our president to be Republican. If wailing about immigration is a way to get us there, we’ll go for that, because we’re party people first.’ ”
Still, the immigration debate in South Florida is more nuanced, Grenier said. Miami is a city that has been shaped over the last 60-plus years by waves of immigrants, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean, and many voters still believe in a legal pathway for people to come into the country, he said.
A survey released in November by the Latino advocacy group UnidosUS found that while more than 1 in 5 Florida Hispanics see immigration as the most pressing issue for elected officials to address, exactly half said that the U.S. should provide a pathway to citizenship for long-time undocumented immigrants living in the country.
Thirty-eight percent of Florida Hispanics said that ramping up border security was a more-important undertaking.
Fernand Amandi, a Miami-based Democratic pollster, said that Republicans rely on the chaos at the U.S. southern border to rile up their conservative base and stir fear among voters. At Thursday’s Hispanic voter town hall at FIU, Amandi noted that Biden and Senate Democrats were ready to pass a bipartisan bill intended to stymie the record number of illegal border crossings, but Republicans blocked that legislation at Trump’s urging.
“Who came out and said we are not doing this bill?” said Amandi, who is Cuban-American. “Donald Trump, the Republican nominee-in-waiting.”
Playing out in real time
Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, Florida has its own set of immigration-related challenges.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Wednesday that he will deploy hundreds of state law enforcement officers and soldiers to South Florida and the Keys to head off a potential surge in Haitians fleeing their embattled homeland. Haiti is in the midst of a political crisis and its government is teetering on the brink of total collapse, raising concerns among state and federal officials that many Haitians could make the harrowing 700-mile boat trip to Florida in an effort to escape the chaos.
National immigration issues have also been front and center in South Florida’s city halls. In Hialeah, a majority-immigrant city with one of the most Cuban populations in the United States, officials have been pointing fingers at newly arrived immigrants for exacerbating some of the city’s problems, including a lack of affordable housing.
In November, shortly after the Trump rally in Hialeah, the City Council unanimously renamedan avenue after the former president. It also condemned Biden’s immigration policies last month in an official resolution that said the “influx of illegal immigrants has brought significant social and economic changes” to Hialeah.
Mayor Esteban Bovo recently told the Herald and el Nuevo Herald that his concerns about the consequences of migration on his city aren’t driven by anti-immigrant sentiments, but rather practical governance.
“It would be very, very hypocritical of myself to say that people are not welcome, because we’re not down with that,” he said. “But do we need the infrastructure and the ability to accommodate people? Yes. Do we have it? No.”
