Donald Trump’s biggest applause line at rallies in Ohio continues to be a promise: “Don’t worry; we’re going to build a wall.”
It’s a line that oddly resonates in a state where the experience with immigration is far different from most of the country.
Ohio has only about a third the national average when it comes to the percentage — 4 percent — of foreign-born people living here. The state ranks 12th from the bottom. And of that tiny group of immigrants, fewer than 1 in 5 are here without the necessary papers.
Moreover, support for Trump is strongest in the counties where immigrants are least likely to be found — if not leaving.
Polling of Ohioans for the Your Vote Ohio project shows an odd disconnect on the issue. Asked in an open-ended question to name the top issues in 2016, immigration doesn’t make the top 10.
But when asked to define the reasons they like either Trump or Hillary Clinton, it’s his stand on immigration that helps Ohioans define Trump as a good candidate.
And in a state that is always pivotal to winning the presidential election, Trump has found ways to make immigration critical to dealing with the most important issues on Ohioans’ minds, among them the economy and terrorism.
Differing perspectives
Linda Riley grew up near Steubenville and has been to Trump rallies on both sides of the Ohio River — in communities battered by the collapse of steel and coal and major population losses. Illegal immigration and the economy are her biggest issues, and she says they’re intertwined.
“They’re taking jobs away from citizens. And everybody likes to say that they’ll take jobs that other people won’t. Well, how do we know that? Let’s get them out of here and we’ll see.”
But for immigrant families, many in pockets in Cuyahoga, Lake and Franklin counties, the debate about their role in the community is not hypothetical.
Elizabeth Perez is a U.S. military veteran — military service is something immigrants are as likely to do as native-born Americans — and her husband, Marcos, was deported for not being in the country with proper documents.
At a town hall in Cleveland in March, she pressed Clinton on how she would change policy and practice to allow Marcos to return to the U.S. from Mexico.
“Along with my husband, there have been over 2 million people deported since 2010. And almost a quarter of them are parents of U.S. citizen children. That’s two Cleveland Ohio’s of moms and dads just like my husband, up and gone out of their children’s lives,” she said.
Between Riley and Perez are a lot of people with mixed feelings — the kind reflected in a recent national poll by Pew Research that found voters about evenly split over whether border enforcement or a pathway to citizenship should be the nation’s priority.
The largest group said they’re of equal concern.
Tony Stutz, a retired teacher in the small Wayne County town of Dalton, works part time at the hardware store. He pauses while cutting pipe to answer a big concern: what to do with the 11 million people in the U.S. who are here illegally.
“We all came here because of a reason of persecution, suffering, looking for a better life. My feeling is that most of these people are searching for the same thing. If they’re here for an alternative motive I would go along with maybe sending them back. But for the most part, if they’re a contributing part of society like all of us should be, that’s the whole goal of the thing.”
Stutz’s personal experience with immigrants began when Mennonite missionaries sponsored families from Laos resettling here. And his experience may be closer to Ohio’s immigration reality than most people realize.
Immigrants in Ohio
Who are Ohio’s immigrants?
The census shows more than a third of Ohio’s immigrants came from Asia; Latin America doesn’t even rank second as a region of origin, again creating an experience different from the nation.
When it comes to immigrants in the state illegally, Latin America moves up to a strong No. 1. But Asia still accounts for about a quarter, according to a new report from the Migration Policy Institute.
Ohio’s immigrants also tend to be more educated and have higher incomes than the immigrant population nationally and Ohioans in general. More than 20 percent of foreign-born residents have a bachelor’s degree compared with less than 16 percent of native Ohioans.
Even among immigrants without documents, 37 percent have at least some college.
Average earnings are about 18 percent higher than native Ohioans.
As for those who are here without documents, “anywhere from 45 to 50 percent are so-called visa overstayers, the people who had legitimate visas when they arrived and then they overstayed for one reason or another,” explained Migration Policy Institute Senior Analyst Jeanne Batalova.
That includes visas for students from Asian countries attracted to Ohio’s universities, and visas to visit families.
And “it’s much more expensive to fly from Asia, from Africa, so only people with a certain level of means would be able to do that.”
Those two factors — here for college and the means to afford extensive travel — help explain the higher education and incomes for Ohio’s immigrants, she said.
The economic impact
Regardless of their origin, lots of Ohioans believe immigrants take jobs and keep wages low for native-born Americans.
Chris Howard is among them. He’s African-American, 52, grew up in East Cleveland and is training for a data-entry job after massive layoffs at the automotive parts plant where he worked for years.
He maintains a porous border “gives the immigrants a chance to work for less money and ... people tend to hire them first.”
Census data show that immigrants are indeed less likely to be jobless than native Ohioans — by a little more than a percentage point. And they’re far more likely to have jobs in private businesses rather than government.
Ohio’s foreign-born population is clustered largely around its big cities. Franklin County has the most and has been growing the fastest. But midsize counties like Summit and Montgomery have seen growth, too.
Lagging far behind is the region along the Ohio River, which continues to lead Ohio in unemployment. It’s in counties like those that Trump prevailed over Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the March primary election.
Reanne Frank, a demographer at Ohio State University, says the high unemployment creates a familiar pattern.
Immigrants “have very little to do with the issues that these communities are facing. They’re not even there. But some of these communities are going through transformations, and some people are being left behind. And these kinds of moments are when immigration as a scapegoat gains a certain amount of traction.”
M.L. Schultze can be emailed at schultze@wksu.org and followed on Twitter @MLSchultze