Across the U.S., Latino immigrants who’ve been in the country a long time felt that asylum-seekers got preferential treatment. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing,” said one woman from Mexico who has lived in Wisconsin for decades.
by Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg, for ProPublica
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At first, she didn’t think much about the Nicaraguan asylum-seekers who began moving into town a few years ago. Rosa was an immigrant too, one of the many undocumented Mexican immigrants who’d settled nearly 30 years ago in Whitewater, a small university town in southeast Wisconsin.
Some of the Nicaraguans had found housing in Rosa’s neighborhood, a trailer park at the edge of town. They sent their children to the same public schools. And they got jobs in the same factories and food-processing facilities that employed many of Rosa’s friends and relatives.
Then Rosa realized that many of the newcomers with ongoing asylum cases could apply for work permits and driver’s licenses—state and federal privileges that are unavailable to undocumented immigrants. Rosa’s feelings of indifference turned to frustration and resentment.
“It’s not fair,” said Rosa, who works as a janitor. “Those of us who have been here for years get nothing.”
Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that could benefit people like her. In our reporting on the new effects of immigration, ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the U.S. by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.
It’s one of the reasons so many Latino voters chose Donald Trump this election, giving him what appears to be Republicans’ biggest win in a presidential race since exit polls began tracking this data. Latinos’ increased support for Trump—who says he could use the military to execute his plans for mass deportations—defied conventional wisdom, disrupting long-held assumptions about loyalties to the Democratic Party. The shift could give Republicans reason to cater to Latinos to keep them in the party’s fold.
