Wisconsin’s vote on the edge as immigrant scare stories spread

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The writer is a contributing columnist, based in Chicago

Immigrants eating dogs in Ohio and hijacking school buses in California: false migrant scare stories have already marred the US election campaign. But when one turns out to have substance, it can run away with the public imagination — and potentially make all the difference in a tight race. 

Recently, former president Donald Trump seized on the story of a Venezuelan illegal immigrant, with ties to the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, arrested for sexually assaulting a woman and attacking her daughter in a remote corner of Wisconsin. The alleged assault took place in the picturesque Mississippi River town of Prairie du Chien, one of the oldest European settlements in the Midwest, in one of the tightest of electoral swing states, Wisconsin. The last two presidential elections were decided there by a margin of under 1 per cent. 

Entering town earlier this month, I stopped for advice on how to pronounce the town’s French name: locally, it’s called “Prairie doo Sheen”. Trump had been there only days before, using the Venezuelan gang case to hammer home one of his favourite campaign themes: his claim that many illegal immigrants are criminals. Recently, he insisted that immigrants are genetically predisposed to crime. Immigration experts say he has severely distorted migrant crime statistics, but I wanted to see if the 5,373 residents of Prairie du Chien were worried. 

It is the period of the town’s autumn yard sales, so I went from yard to yard asking: how can immigration be such a big issue in a city over 1,200 miles from the southern border, with a tiny migrant population (even the mayor couldn’t put a number to it), of mostly hard-working farm workers? 

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

Gokey told me that his surname is the anglicisation of his ancestral French name, Gauthier. Doesn’t that make him an immigrant too, just like me and most Americans? What about the nearby ceremonial mounds of the original Native American inhabitants of the area, who would have seen both of us as illegal immigrants? Gokey remained adamant: “illegal immigration is a problem in the whole country, including here,” and Trump should be re-elected because he “solved it” when he was last in office. 

“I’m Hispanic myself and I think immigrant crime is a problem here,” a 35- year-old Latina mother told me, collecting crumpled dollar bills from the day’s sales. She declined to give her name because of her husband’s job. “In their home countries, crime is not controlled and people are afraid of those criminals there and then they come here,” she insisted. Trump’s message seemed to be resonating on the yard sale circuit: I didn’t find anyone who disputed it. 

Mayor Dave Hemmer doesn’t agree: “politicians like to blow things out of proportion a little bit,” he told me, adding “we had that one isolated incident, and we haven’t had anything else, and I don’t expect to have anything else”. Dale Klemme, the local Democratic party chair, also insisted that “there is no problem . . . this Venezuelan did not randomly pick somebody to attack” so there was no risk to the general public — police have said he was known to the woman he allegedly assaulted. 

But local Republicans are clearly exploiting the arrest for all it’s worth: at the local GOP office, oversized mug shots of migrants charged with crimes in Wisconsin are arrayed in a kind of immigrant wall of shame.  

The issue “unites and galvanises the Republican party,” Wisconsin pollster Charles Franklin told me. His latest Marquette Law School poll shows that “after the economy, immigration is [Wisconsin voters’] second most important issue.” Trump has potently linked the two, alleging that immigrants are taking US jobs and even draining hurricane-relief funds. 

Will immigrant scare stories tip the electoral balance in razor-thin Wisconsin? Nobody knows for sure, but in this campaign Republicans insist that “every state is a border state”. Even the quietest corner of the furthest state is being dragged into the political border war.