Changing demographics and the political calculus of anti-immigrant rhetoric in swing states

As former President Donald Trump& worked to scuttle a bipartisan border deal& in Congress because it threatened to derail his campaign’s focus on immigration, Republicans in Arizona& unveiled a plan to empower local officials to jail and deport migrants, decrying the federal government’s lack of solutions. “Arizona is in a crisis,” state Senate President Warren Petersen said in late January. “This is directly due to the negligent inaction of the Biden administration.” What followed were months of GOP lawmakers in Arizona making use of Trump’s border security rhetoric, employing xenophobic language to cast immigrants and asylum-seekers as criminals. But there was strident opposition to the plan, too, from many Latino and immigrant Arizonans who traveled to the state Capitol to protest the legislation. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris offer starkly different plans for the future of the 11 million people who live in the United States without legal status. Harris, in a bid to stave off accusations that she’s soft on the border, has sought to establish a firm security stance. To that end, she has vowed to bring back and sign the torpedoed bipartisan border deal. On the campaign trail, Trump has taken a far more hawkish approach,...