How Immigration Is Playing Out in 2024 Battleground States - Bloomberg

How Immigration Is Playing Out in 2024 Battleground States - Bloomberg

Impacts

There’s no issue generating more heat in the presidential contest than immigration. So, what does the data tell us about the impact migrants are having in the seven battleground states that will decide whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris wins the White House in November?  We took a dive into immigration court data collected by researchers at Syracuse University to answer that question. You can read our full write-up here, but here’s some headline findings: Just 12% of the 1.8 million asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants who landed in the US in 2023 settled in the battleground states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The overwhelming majority of those who settled in swing states (72%) listed addresses in counties that went for President Joe Biden in 2020. The migrants tended to do what new arrivals to the US have done for generations — they settled in places with growing economies and plenty of jobs where they bolstered the labor force. In swing states, 85% of migrants settled in counties where local economies recovered quickly enough from the 2020 pandemic recession that they were bigger in real terms at the end of 2022 than they were pre-pandemic, according to the latest available official data. Most of the swing-state counties won by Trump in 2020, where immigration is one of the most animating issues, are not seeing many migrants. In many cases, those counties are also badly in need of more workers to battle population decline and slow recoveries from the pandemic-induced recession. But even fast-growing communities that have seen big influxes of migrants are facing challenges. It can take many months for new arrivals to get work authorization as cases wend their way through an overloaded immigration court system. They can also put pressure on local schools and rental housing. The overwhelming takeaway is that migration stories don’t always unfold in the ways partisan campaign cliches would suggest. In some communities — whether sympathetic or hostile to migrants — the prevailing politics are in friction with local economic interests.  That creates a messaging challenge for Trump and Harris as well as a policy conundrum for local leaders looking to their communities’ future long after this presidential campaign comes to an end.— Shawn Donnan