Do You Know Why Immigrants Love Trump?

A president who likens them to rapist murderers and garbage has now secured their vote for HIS party for years to come.

Courtesy of Litterbins

Trump, if he even understands what he promised to his many followers — they are, after all, the majority of the electorate this time — will start taking out the garbage from January 20th, 2025. Garbage is immigrants. The “invasion” of humans moving from desperation to a new life has been deemed less than human, and so they will be treated like trash — off you go.

As someone who has lived voluntarily as an immigrant, I can tell you that most of us aren’t trash. I moved to Russia in 1994 and was happily living life until the war with Ukraine began. Then, I ended up involuntarily stuck in Europe, unable to return to my home in St. Petersburg. After bouncing around for a few months, we settled in Portugal and have since lived here as legal immigrants. We are good citizens of this society. In two short years, my son speaks as if he had been born here. 

I can tell you a lot about life in Portugal, but I can’t tell you about its politics. I read the papers, but the political articles mean nothing to me. I don’t know the context and honestly don’t care. I don’t want to engage in local politics, and I can tell you it makes life less stressful than it usually is. 

There is one thing, though, that all expats keep an eye on in local politics. Every expat, or let’s call a spade a spade, immigrant residing here for the long term is aware of the rules and regulations regarding immigration. We were part of the first wave of immigrants who came to the country after the beginning of the war. A lot about the process of obtaining residency here was easier that it is for people two year later. As new waves arrive from Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan, India, Mozambique, and Brazil, the process gets harder and harder.

Do you want to hear the strangest thing, though? It makes us happy that the newcomers have a more challenging time than we did. Hearing Russian spoken used to be rare on the streets, but now we hear it everywhere. The “Russian women’s chat” my wife runs grew from eight women to 96. It’s no longer possible to know everyone, and we have lost a little of the quaintness of our shared moment. We were escaping the war and the rising fascism in Russia. We celebrated holidays together, and the kids played in the parks together. Now, the community has broken up into cliques of common interests, and that’s okay.

These groups of immigrants exist now among Ukrainians. There are even more of them. Then there are the Indians who started opening up shops. Everyone perceives the immigrants from Pakistan as the “worst.” They are peasants, for the most part, brutally uneducated and not used to living in modern society. They can be spotted a mile away, and since waves of them began arriving two years ago, anti-immigrant sentiments from the Portuguese, which were usually reserved for people from Brazil, are increasing for all of us. 

I will tell you that I don’t feel any animosity, but that probably stems from our actively trying to fit in. We go to the places where the locals go, and we don’t rely only on other expats for our friendships. We somehow fit in. So much so that other Portuguese have told me they don’t like all of the new immigration. Once, I reminded the guy that I was an immigrant, and he looked at me like I was crazy, “Not you. You’re one of us.”

Nevertheless, the laws are changing to make it harder to immigrate. With each new wave of immigrants arriving, there is a sense among many recent arrivals already enjoying the benefits of temporary residency that enough is enough. I hear the comments from some of the Russians and others. When they were struggling to get set up, they whined about how unfair it was, but now, as members of the local society, they don’t want the benefits to get watered down by the new waves of immigrants. They don’t want the locals to be angry with us. 

Immigrants in the U.S.

I have heard this kind of reasoning among immigrants in the U.S. Once they become part of the country, they want to make sure that the reasons that made them leave initially don’t suddenly turn up stalking their new neighborhoods in the U.S. Immigrants from South and Central America who made it so far that they are living in their homes in rural America and accepted by the local community don’t want waves of “other immigrants” to rock the boat for them. 

All it takes is a lie like the one put out there by Trump and Vance about eating cats and dogs, and lives get ruined overnight. The Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, were thriving, and then a lie spread by the now president-elect turned their community into a victim of white supremacy and fascism. Springfield, Ohio, may, in the future, be known as the first victim of Trump’s fascist revolution. 

When immigrants in America wake up at 4 a.m. to go to jobs at restaurants, warehouses, markets, or the fields, the joy they get walking out onto relatively peaceful streets that lead them to comparatively high-paying jobs is a mini-Rockwellian moment that most born in the U.S. can’t appreciate. The last thing immigrants who slowly build their lives with hard work want is waves of competitors. The view is that if I, so-and-so from the Dominican Republic, want my mother, sister, or wife to come and live with me, then I will work it out somehow. If the system gets overrun, then I won’t get my mother over, and I might be asked to leave, too. 

It is not easy to “fit in,” it’s so easy for some bad apples to come up from some other far-off culture who will ruin the good situation for “all of us.”

This is why immigrants love people like Donald Trump. First of all, I am sure that most immigrants who were eligible to vote this year know next to zero about who Trump is. They don’t know anything about his Access Hollywood moment. They know very little about how he behaved during his first presidency. They don’t understand his role on January 6th. The only thing they know is how he promises to rid America of the “vermin” sneaking across the border. The immigrants living legally become, in the context of Trump’s perverse worldview, “good people” because they are here and being productive. The police only go after the lawbreakers and protect the law-abiding, right?

Having come from broken and, in some cases, failed societies overrun by crime and corruption, the eager immigrants are filled with pride and joy at the notion that a policeman or anyone in authority would find them “productive and good.” Casting a vote for the Democrat who promises to be more lenient when it comes to immigration suddenly becomes an impossibility. 

The immigrants, coming from countries where tyrants, freaks, and corrupt dictator wannabes are the norm, find someone like Donald Trump to be like a breath of fresh air. He blusters like all of their former leaders, but he doesn’t use the military to assassinate those opposed to him, and that makes Trump the right choice for them. They don’t know our history — and most Americans don’t — and so they can’t understand that much of what Trump does, says, stands for pits him and his followers against the nation’s very democracy. 

Many of the immigrants have experience with corrupt leaders who have kill lists, so when Trump speaks his gibberish and makes thousands laugh, they exhale soundly and assure themselves that America’s system of democracy is the best in the world. What they see in Trump is a better version of the dictators from whom they escaped, and when they see Democrats, they imagine — and are told at work and by “Fox News” — that Trump will “fix everything” and protect them from the wild hordes from the south.

It all makes sense, right? 

Add the fact that many come from Catholic countries, and we have a landslide in the making because of the abortion issue. No immigrant wants to be on the radar — trust me — and so they always wish there to be no waves at all, peaceful like the ocean was on the night the Titanic hit the iceberg.