In Donald Trump’s Republican Party, immigration is one of the few issues on which there remains a party line. On trade, Republicans are divided between protectionists and free traders. On foreign policy, Russia hawks joust with China hawks, though both seem open to bombing Mexico. On economics, rhetorical commitments to protecting entitlements sit side by side with traditional GOP libertarianism. While Trump’s personalist reign over the party has for now suppressed these conflicts, the divisions are nonetheless obvious.
Not so with immigration. For the last decade, there has been no Republican dissent from nativism and repression. Since Trump first declared his candidacy in 2015, it has been his signature issue, and even before his rise the party had decisively rejected the pro-immigration conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. On this issue, more than on any other, the party is united.
Yet as Trump now enacts this agenda with frightening brutality, it has ironically revealed some of the cracks in his coalition. If opposition to immigration is the glue that holds the Republican Party together, it is also an issue on which the party is far out of touch with its benefactors in the capitalist class. There is, quite simply, no sector of capital with any enthusiasm for Trump’s unleashing of the body snatchers in black balaclavas. In fact, it directly threatens some of his strongest supporters.
Though much has been made of Trump’s success among both blue-collar workers and billionaires, small-business owners form an often overlooked core of his base. Academic research has repeatedly identified the importance of this group of Trump supporters, finding that business owners and the locally rich — those with a higher income relative to their community, if not the nation as a whole — are some of his most fervent backers. Often they own businesses in sectors where location matters, like hospitality, commercial agriculture, construction, and…
Auteur: Paul Heideman
