Opinion | Trump’s Other Base

During the first wave of the Great Migration of black people from the South to the North and West, some Northern black people were also afraid that the newcomers would upset the delicate balance that they thought they had achieved with white people.

As Kelly Miller, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the historically black Howard University, wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1916:

“Should the influx of negro laborers to the North, without proper restriction and control, be allowed to prejudice public opinion and thus reproduce Southern proscription in the Northern States, the last state of the race would be worse than the first.”

Add to this friction that although Americans often think of Hispanics as monolithic, they are anything but. Hispanics in America come from multiple countries and territories, some born abroad, others born here. Many of the asylum seekers at the border are from Central America. How Mexicans in California, Cubans in Florida or Puerto Ricans in New York feel about the influx may differ.

Furthermore, we like to think of Hispanics as non-white, but Hispanic is an ethnicity, and Hispanics can identify as any color. Many Hispanics identify as white; they do so here and they do so in the home countries and territories. For instance, Puerto Rico is 99 percent Hispanic and nearly seven out of 10 people on the island identify as white.

Also, the longer Hispanics are in the United States, the less they identify as Hispanic. A 2017 Pew study found that while 97 percent of foreign-born Hispanics in America identify as Hispanic, only 50 percent of fourth-generation or higher Hispanics do.

I believe that Trump’s team, if not him, understands the fissures in this immigration debate and is using them.

A Quinnipiac University poll last year found that 54 percent of blacks and 55 percent of Hispanics thought immigrants’ illegal crossing of the border with Mexico was an important problem., Additionally, 31 percent of blacks and 40 percent of Hispanics believed in using the National Guard to patrol the border with Mexico, and 13 percent of blacks and 25 percent of Hispanics supported the building of Trump’s wall.