Trump’s pledge to deport legal immigrants is toxic in more ways than one

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania state Sen. Camera Bartolotta (R) repeatedly found herself challenging anti-immigrant rhetoric from the leader of her party and his allies.

Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, had isolated Charleroi, Pa., in Bartolotta’s district as an example of the sort of place under threat from Haitian immigrants. Responding on Facebook, Bartolotta rejected that idea, noting that the immigrants had “escaped horrific events in Haiti” — a place Trump has disparaged — and were “here LEGALLY to WORK , and pay taxes, and raise their children, and be part of the community.”

Then Libs of TikTok, a social media account that has gained notoriety by mocking the left, promoted a misleading video of Haitian immigrants in the town. Bartolotta again weighed in.

“I follow you & repost but you are playing into the hands of people who are jeopardizing the safety of innocent children in our local school,” she wrote. “These Haitians are working hard, sending their children to school and opening businesses. They are here legally. They did not cross our border. Many are professionals who escaped horrific conditions in their home country.”

The Libs of TikTok account responded by accusing her of having “blasted Trump” by pointing out that his rhetoric was wrong.

Trump was similarly unchastened. At a rally in nearby Indiana, Pa., on Monday, he again singled out Charleroi as an example of the putative perils of immigration.

“Charleroi, Pennsylvania, has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the population of their town,” he said. “Do you know that, right?” He turned his attention to several people in the audience who had cheered at the mention of their town. “Has your town changed slightly?” he asked them with cynical understatement, receiving an affirmative reply.

Speaking of Springfield, Ohio, at another point in his comments — a city that had been the target of baseless claims disparaging Haitian arrivals by him and his running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) — Trump outlined the fate that awaits these immigrants should he win this November’s election.

“Kamala has illegally flown in more than a half a million migrants,” he said, referring to his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. This claim isn’t true; there is a program through which migrants who meet certain requirements can be sponsored for entry to the U.S. on flights they pay for themselves.

Trump turned away from the teleprompter.

“Right? When she was saying, no, no, we don’t want to do that,” Trump said to the audience. “These guys actually want these people in our country. It’s not even believable.”

Back to the teleprompter: “— working with left-wing nonprofits to inundate Pennsylvania communities, changing the character of small towns and villages all over our country and changing them forever.”

“They will never be the same,” he said, again speaking off the cuff. “They will never be. Do you think Springfield will ever be the same? I don’t think —”

A man in the audience yelled out: “Send them back!”

“The fact is,” Trump continued, “and I’ll say it now: You have to get ’em the hell out. You have to get them out. I’m sorry.”

The crowd cheered. Trump claimed that “they’ve destroyed it.” The crowd broke out into a chant: “Send them back! Send them back!”

Again, these are immigrants who are in the country legally, and, as Bartolotta noted, people simply seeking new lives and new opportunities in safety. But Trump calls for these legal arrivals to be deported simply because they are “changing the character of small towns” — a phrase that reflects his political focus on halting America’s slowly changing demography. It’s a phrase, too, that reflects his implicit position that White conservative America is the real America and the one worth defending.

The challenge is that many such places are withering. In her response to Libs of TikTok, Bartolotta made this point explicitly.

“There was no workforce in Charleroi a few years ago when a business owner desperately needed them,” she wrote on X. “He advertised and looked for workers for a long time. Before shutting down completely, he hired an agency that connected immigrants who were vetted and LEGAL to work in his facility. Instead of closing, he now has three shifts working around the clock.”

This is a pattern in a lot of small communities in the United States: The population is disproportionately old, aged out of the workforce. There are relatively few young people who can fill now-vacant jobs, causing employers to shrink. This shift in age is a central reason foreign-born workers have seen higher job growth recently, something else that Trump frames in exaggerated, apocalyptic terms.

We can see how this shift affects Trump-voting areas more heavily thanks to data from the Census Bureau. In counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020, the median age is 39.1 years. In counties that voted for Trump four years ago, it’s 42.2. In Biden counties, an average of about 17 percent of the population is age 65 or over, compared to a fifth of Trump-voting counties.

There’s also a metric that looks at the ratio of elderly to working-age residents. In Biden-voting counties, there are about 29 people age 65 and over for every 100 people of working age. In Trump-voting counties, it’s nearly 36 — meaning more people who are drawing down on resources than paying income taxes.

In rural Republican-voting counties, the numbers are more stark. The average age is slightly higher and there are slightly more people age 65 and over. The same holds for Washington County, Pa., where Charleroi sits: It is older and has a higher elderly-to-working-age ratio than other Republican-voting counties on average.

Immigrants can — and, as Bartolotta notes, do — fill that gap. But not often. Analysis published by Bloomberg this month showed that immigrants to the United States predominantly settle in blue counties with vibrant economies. That’s in part because of those economies and in part because immigrants have long been drawn to cities with large communities from their home countries.

Trump’s pledge to deport the immigrants who defy that trend, settling in small towns in economically struggling area, is obviously toxic and demagogic. His campaign is centered on presenting immigrants as dangerous and antithetical to America (which history quickly reveals as false). It’s part of his broader focus on stoking his supporters’ fear of change in any form, particularly change that overlaps with race.

This particular argument, though, is also damaging to those supporters. The handful of rally attendees from Charleroi might be anguished by seeing Black immigrants around town, but their state senator, at least, recognizes how the town benefits from those immigrants’ presence. Even setting aside the basic issues of empathy, having immigrants who want to keep local industries open is better for a region than having those industries close because there aren’t enough people to fill the positions.

Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump and you are trying to win an election by portraying dark-skinned immigrants as dangerous and divisive, pledging to uproot them. His supporters might cheer as the recent legal arrivals seeking a new, better life are forced to return to Haiti. They might then wonder, a few months later, why their dying towns continue to hollow out.