The Wisconsin vote hangs in the balance as scare stories about immigrants spread

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The author is a contributing columnist based in Chicago

Immigrants eat dogs in Ohio and hijack school buses in California: False horror stories about migrants have already tarnished the US election campaign. But when you’re shown to have substance, it can overwhelm the public’s imagination — and potentially make the difference in a close race.

Recently, former President Donald Trump took up the story of a Venezuelan illegal immigrant who had ties to the United States Tren de Aragua Gang of criminals arrested for sexually assaulting a woman and attacking her daughter in a remote corner of Wisconsin. The alleged attack occurred in the picturesque Mississippi River town of Prairie du Chien, one of the oldest European settlements in the Midwest, in Wisconsin, one of the states with the most electoral swings. The last two presidential elections were decided there with a majority of less than one percent.

When I came to the city earlier this month, I stopped to ask for advice on how to pronounce the city’s French name: locally, it is “Prairie doo Sheen”. Trump had been there just days earlier and had used the Venezuelan gang case to drive home one of his favorite campaign themes: his claim that many illegal immigrants are criminals. He recently emphasized that immigrants have a genetic predisposition to crime. Immigration experts say it has greatly distorted migrant crime statistics, but I wanted to see if Prairie du Chien’s 5,373 residents were worried.

It’s the time of year for the city’s fall flea markets, so I went from farm to farm asking: How can immigration happen in a city that’s more than 1,200 miles from the southern border and has a tiny immigrant population (even? the mayor couldn’t do that) be such a big problem? I won’t call it a number) made up of mostly hard-working farm workers?

Everyone immediately brought up the Venezuelan case. “This is not a fabrication,” Trump supporter Cory Gokey, 48, told me. He was referring to the fact that while local officials deny that migrants eat pets in Ohio, Prairie du Chien’s arrest was confirmed by local police .

Gokey told me that his last name was the anglicization of his French ancestral name Gauthier. Doesn’t that make him an immigrant, like me and most Americans? What about the nearby ceremonial mounds of the area’s indigenous people, who would have viewed both of us as illegal immigrants? Gokey remained adamant: “Illegal immigration is a problem across the country, including here,” and Trump should be reelected because he “solved it” the last time he was in office.

“As a Hispanic myself, I think immigration crime is a problem here,” a 35-year-old Latina mother who was collecting crumpled dollar bills from the day’s sales told me. She refused to give her name because her husband was working. “Crime is not controlled in their home countries and people are afraid of the criminals there and then they come here,” she stressed. Trump’s message seemed to resonate with the flea market scene: I didn’t find anyone who disputed it.

Mayor Dave Hemmer disagrees: “Politicians tend to blow things out of the water a little,” he told me, adding: “We had this one isolated case, and we haven’t had anything else, and I don’t expect that. “have something different”. Dale Klemme, the chairman of the local Democratic Party, also emphasized: “There is no problem. . . “This Venezuelan did not randomly select someone to attack,” so there was no danger to the general public — police said he was known to the woman he allegedly attacked.

But local Republicans are clearly taking full advantage of the arrest: At the local GOP office, oversized mugshots of migrants charged with crimes in Wisconsin are lined up in a sort of immigrant wall of shame.

The issue “unites and mobilizes the Republican Party,” Wisconsin pollster Charles Franklin told me. His most recent Marquette Law School poll shows that “after the economy comes immigration.” [Wisconsin voters’] second most important issue.” Trump has clearly linked the two, claiming that immigrants are taking away U.S. jobs and even depleting hurricane relief funds.

Will horror stories about immigrants affect the electoral balance in wafer-thin Wisconsin? No one knows for sure, but this campaign Republicans are insisting that “every state is a border state.” Even the quietest corner of the most remote state is drawn into the political border war.