News Americas, MIAMI, FL, Weds. Nov. 21, 2018: It is unfathomable that any immigrant, or voter with immigrant heritage, would vote for the Party of Trump, aka the GOP, right? Wrong!
According to the latest analysis of the midterm elections by the Pew Research Center, a combined 52 percent of Hispanic and Asian voters shockingly voted for Republican candidates.
That is mind boggling, given the blatant bigotry that marked Donald Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants and his ‘caravan’ wolf cry to his so-called “base” in the weeks leading up to the election.
While the “base” of Trump’s support has always appeared to be older uneducated whites, fearful of the return to brown America; a group that truly believes they are superior and cannot stand the thought of being relegated to the ‘minority’ grouping, the Pew data tells a surprisingly story.
Much like the voting trend in the 2016 election that saw Trump emerge as the unlikely President of the Free World, the Pew analysis showed that 29 percent of Hispanics voted Republic in these past midterms, despite the ramped-up rhetoric directed mainly at the so-called caravan made up of Central American immigrants, aka Latinos, aka Hispanics.
In Florida alone, 66 percent of the Cuban-American vote went to Republican gubernatorial candidate, Ron Desantis, according to an analysis by communications strategist Giancarlo Sopo of results from 35 precincts in Hialeah and suburbs in southwest Miami-Dade.
Meanwhile, the Center found that 23 percent Asians voted Republican, which some experts claim is due to the fact that his administration backed students suing Harvard University over affirmative-action programs they said discriminate against Asian-Americans.
The trend comes on the heels of the 2016 Presidential election, when the same leaning became astonishingly evident. In the 2016 election, 29 percent of Latino immigrants and18 percent of Asians voted for Trump. Among Asians, according to the Asian American Legal Defense Fund, 32 percent of Vietnamese American voted for Trump.
So what does all this tell us?
It speaks to the larger global racist and mental slavery mindset in the home countries of these immigrants and their descendants. It is a mindset where blacks are always viewed as inferior; where a white patriarchal society is viewed as ideal; where the accumulation of wealth trumps any other ideals and where classism rules – making it so easy to vote against the xenophobia which they see as directed not at them, but at those less than them, despite the fact that they are of one ethnic origin.
In their minds, it is not so much immigrant against immigrant, but self-interest and self-empowerment above all else. The Democratic Party would be wise of take note of this fact going into the 2020 election and recognize and support their main base – the predominantly black women voters, including immigrant voters from the Caribbean and Africa, who lent their black power to making the blue wave possible in the House.
The writer is CMO at Hard Beat Communications, Inc. which owns the brands: NewsAmericasNow, CaribPRWire and InvestCaribbeanNow.
