Why Did Immigrants Support Trump?

Why Did Immigrants Support Trump?

The political problem of the border arises from a broader crisis of state legitimacy.

Why on Earth did an Ecuadorian undocumented migrant—a single mother and low-wage worker—root for Trump? Back in the summer of 2024, I chatted about the election with a woman working at the hair salon. She said she did not understand U.S. politics all that well. But she did understand that Trump was tough, and that he promised to protect people against criminal gangs. I replied that Trump’s policies would put her in danger. She responded that she knew the U.S. government was no friend of hers, but she had managed to stay in the United States—so far.

Today I can’t stop thinking about that conversation. As I write in February, the effects of the new administration’s executive orders are already being felt at the southern border. Trump administration officials, who describe the border as a war zone, are sending troops there to repel what they call an “invasion.” I saw footage of a woman in Ciudad Juárez weeping in despair as her longed-for asylum appointment vanished, together with the just-deleted CBP One app, which had previously allowed migrants to apply for interviews at ports of entry. She had likely waited for months to make her case for asylum, but now her chances are gone.

“The border” has become a fixation in American politics. For most people it is reducible to the question of what to do about uncontrolled immigration. Trump supporters believe that there is a surge in illegal crossings that puts them in danger and undermines citizens’ well-being. To rally this group, the administration and its allies in Congress promise to deliver security through executive orders and laws like the Laken Riley Act, named after a nursing student who was killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant last year. The law empowers federal immigration enforcement agencies to detain and deport any unauthorized immigrant merely accused (not charged) of minor crimes such as shoplifting.

On the other side are those who fear what will happen to the vulnerable people trying to cross the border who have been turned into scapegoats by the right. They see that Trump’s policies undermine the legal rights of asylum seekers and the human rights of all migrants. But they often presume that all immigrants share a common identity, and they think that there should be solidarity among them. It is hard for people in this group (like many of those who write and read this magazine, including myself) to understand why anyone would prefer Trump—let alone a person whom his policies target directly. Why, we ask, did the lady at the hair salon support him?

I can’t answer for her. But I think the reason this puzzles us is that we’re asking the wrong questions about the border. Maybe the problem is not primarily about migrants and their communities and identities. Maybe the problem is not with “them,” but with the states that both need those migrants and want to be rid of them.

Border crossings have complex roots. Migration is entangled with poverty; displacement goes hand in hand with climate change; and people smuggling piggybacks on drug policies, international commerce, and tariffs. Migration is driven in part by instability and economic hardship in the sending countries. Meanwhile, in a receiving country like the United States, collapsing public services, poor healthcare, underinvestment in education, sky-high housing prices, and the upward redistribution of wealth to an ever-shrinking elite all get blamed on the newcomers. The political problem of the border thus arises from a broader crisis of legitimacy of the state.

The obsession with the border and fear of migrants are symptoms of this crisis. The state has not successfully provided the goods that justify government, so some states force people to migrate, and others blame migrants for their problems. Migrants also remind us that the mechanisms for assigning citizenship are unjust, and exclusion is unjustified when states are connected in the worldwide economic system that benefits from migrant labor. Immigration reform in the United States is not sufficient to get us out of the crisis, and focusing on the border or migrant communities as a problem is a distraction from the urgent political task of rebuilding institutions and cooperating with others abroad.

Migrants are a reminder that citizenship in a rich country is a matter of luck. Yet blaming all ills on migrants allows citizens to pretend otherwise: if migrants are bad people, maybe that means that citizens deserve their status. Moreover, migrants often represent imagined dangers that lie beyond the border (even if they are within the geographical limits of the country). Migrants get blamed for social ills; they are the canaries in the coalmine when there is a crisis of state legitimacy. All this is reflected in border policy.

Borders are not always a problem. They are vital to states for many reasons. An important one that is often overlooked is that borders put a limit on power. Jurisdictional boundaries allow populations to keep power contained, and they allow us to have certainty about where the law applies. They also allow us to keep democratic power alive by determining who is a member of the people in a democracy. But states cannot do this sorting without injustice.

Some countries define the population in terms of territory: those who are born in the state’s territory count as members (citizenship law calls this jus soli, law of the soil). Others define territory in terms of the people: the territory contains the state because it belongs to an ethnic group that claims it as their homeland, and they pass citizenship from parents to children. The Trump administration’s assault on birthright citizenship shows that their definition of the population is ethnic (they favor jus sanguinis, the law of the blood).

Most liberals today believe that this sorting mechanism is unjust because it excludes people for reasons beyond their control: nobody chooses their parents or their race. It seems, then, that it would be more just to treat everyone equally under the law, and to make citizens of all those who are in the territory (or at least of all those who are born in the territory, as the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment requires). But under such a system, territorial presence is all important. The stakes of letting people in or keeping them out become much higher, making borders into an unjust sorting machine.

Both jus sanguinis and jus soli produce arbitrary distinctions: nobody gets to choose the circumstances of their birth, and a person is not more deserving because they happened to have been born, or because they happen to be standing, in one place rather than another. As so many displaced and stateless people in the world can attest, if you happen to be secure in your citizenship, if your ethnicity is the dominant one in your country of origin, if you have no problem getting a passport, you are not a better person—you just got lucky.

So the criteria to deny citizenship are not fair. But there is a second problem: why do states claim that they—and only they—can decide who is let into a given territory?

For liberal democrats, governments are legitimate only when the people authorize and control them. But if we agree with liberal principles, and accept that ethnic or blood distinctions are unjust, and if we agree that territory determines who is a member of the people, then legitimate governments require an original legitimate territory to sort out those who are members of the people from those who are not. That is precisely what we don’t have. States lack original territorial legitimacy.

I have recently seen several cartoons with the same theme circulating on social media: an American native demands that the “illegal aliens” leave. The joke is that the “illegal aliens” are white American settlers. The cartoon works because we all know that the United States started as a settler colony, and it took wars and genocides to dispossess the peoples that lived in this land before. Even today, when settler states are legal (because they established their own law), their power to control territory is illegitimate from a liberal democratic perspective, because they gained it by force and deceit. This is true of every state, including those that are not established by settlers. States are founded by conquest or revolutionary violence, not by consent or majority vote.

The reasons that liberal democracies give to justify who is included and who gets excluded are not consistent with their own principles of equality. Immigrants are a reminder of this contradiction that always mars state legitimacy.

Anyone who studies democratic theory or history knows that there is a trace of illegitimacy at the heart of every legal order. But these philosophical problems do not normally enter everyday politics. People can look away from past injustices when they are covered up by efficiently functioning institutions, or by promises of future equality. But states leak legitimacy when institutions are not trusted and services don’t work. When people feel abandoned by their government, those who feel unsafe will seek to protect themselves with their own resources or ask the state to do it for them. Many people will try to flee and move toward safety; others will resent newcomers who demand the rights and privileges of citizenship. Both pleas to keep the border open and demands to close it are often cries for help from people whose states have failed to keep them secure.

The injustices created by the border are hard to address because there are powerful incentives to keep them in place. The groups of migrants caught in the middle are easy to exploit, and many profit from them. Governments use them as negotiating chips, just like they use other features of borders, such as tariffs or barriers on foreign investment. This is an open secret. In the United States, everybody knows that undocumented immigration means big profits for the agriculture and meatpacking sectors. Everybody knows that restaurants, hotels, and landscaping companies could not run without the low wages that they offer to undocumented workers. Many know about millions made in the business of immigration prisons. Immigrants know that these injustices exist, and some manage to profit from them in turn.

These practices not only create pain and resentment among migrants, but also among citizens whose institutions and communities are undermined by the political economy of grift. Undocumented workers are an underclass that provides cheap labor with limited legal protections. This lack of security makes them more likely to be outsiders in their new communities, which breeds xenophobia.

When politicians promise to keep you secure by closing borders, it is like they are proposing to protect you from a raging fire by hiding you in a wooden chest. The problems from which the border is supposed to protect citizens, like environmental devastation, crime, and economic inequality, cannot be kept outside; in fact, they are partially caused by borders. And given that populations naturally change and move, and societies never stay neatly within the boundaries of a given territory, border closures always separate families and trap people in legal loopholes. Those problems could be tackled with cooperation across legal jurisdictions. And yet the crisis of legitimacy increases many people’s desire for security, unity, and homogeneity—and their willingness to condone the use of brute power to compensate for a loss of order.

The border is a threshold of legality. Like legal emergencies, the border allows politicians to claim exceptional powers: immigration becomes the ideal excuse to centralize power and abuse it. We are witnessing how immigration enforcement has morphed into criminal enforcement, and then into the unchecked power of the government over everyone. Political discussions about the border are never only about immigration.

The violence we now see against migrants is inseparable from the gutting of institutions and public spaces over several decades. If this is true, the border cannot be fixed by controlling immigration and giving papers to unauthorized workers. If a fraying social fabric makes illegitimacy visible, many people will still look for someone else to blame. Xenophobia thrives on disillusionment, distrust of the political class, elite power grabs, and the struggle to secure necessities such as education, healthcare, and housing.

To deal with border anxieties, we can’t start or stop with immigration. We must also intervene in the problem by protecting and expanding public goods and spaces such as schools, parks, and libraries, particularly for the most vulnerable (who include first-generation and unauthorized migrants). Many think that the trust and solidarity required to uphold the welfare state can only be sustained by excluding foreigners, but that ignores that the wealth distributed by the welfare state is also produced by migrants and by connections to people abroad. Large groups of newcomers can produce friction in any society, even one with adequate social services: there will be conflict wherever people speak different languages and see unfamiliar practices and norms taking hold. But in places that are not riddled by poverty, inequality, and state incompetence, such friction can be mitigated.

Genuine solidarity also requires that we join and support organizations that already span across borders, like transnational unions, religious organizations, and movements of indigenous peoples who fight for environmental justice. Trust and solidarity can be built around mutual obligations and common futures, rather than around national culture and race.

Although the idea of recovering public goods and forging international connections may sound disconnected from the border, we have to remember that social infrastructure is vital to addressing the problems that prompt people to migrate or to blame the problems on migrants. If we focus on the linked fates of all the people who lose out from the erosion of the public, we can overcome cultural divisions. We can build societies where large parts of the population don’t see joining a gang or taking drugs as the only way out, and where migration is a choice rather than one’s only hope for survival. If we can rebuild the public inside, outside, and across those borders, the promise of magical solutions from a strong leader would be less attractive for everyone.

The question of why some migrants voted for Trump is only a puzzle if you think that all migrants have common interests; I imagine that many immigrants who voted for Trump wanted to protect their security at the expense of unauthorized newcomers. It is also a mistake to think that not voting for Trump would have solved their problems, which may not have anything to do with the border. The obsession with seeing migration as a problem can distract us from the task of building the political power we will need to overcome the existential challenges our societies face.

Perhaps the lady at the hair salon was not being misled by an electoral campaign; maybe she was reacting to the wider crisis of the liberal state. She wants safety, but she knows that she’s not safe either way. And she can’t vote, so the choice between parties was not that important. Maybe it is easier for her to see that no matter which party governs, the border would reproduce injustices that harm us all. Addressing those injustices requires deeper changes than either party has so far been willing to make.

Paulina Ochoa Espejo is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of On Borders (Oxford University Press, 2020).