Why immigrants defected to Trump

Journalist Mazin Sidahmed on the rightward shift in New York City’s immigrant communities, and how the Texas governor might have helped decide the election

After Kamala Harris’s electoral loss, many observers were shocked by exit polling suggesting immigrants had voted for the most anti-immigrant candidate and platform in recent memory. But that came as a surprise mostly for those who hadn’t been paying attention.

Mazin Sidahmed is the executive director of Documented, a non-profit newsroom that covers and serves New York City’s Chinese-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and Caribbean immigrant communities. Documented not only publishes in multiple languages but does so on the platforms its audiences depend on, from messaging to WhatsApp to WeChat, not only to publish broadly, but to listen and respond to readers in order to get them the critical information they can’t otherwise access, and to report the stories news organizations that haven’t built strong links in immigrant communities can’t get.

We talked to Sidahmed about the rightward shift in the communities he covers, the challenge of providing critical information to undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, the difficulty of speaking truth to power in an age of shamelessness, the impact of Greg Abbott’s forced busing policy on the politics of blue states and cities, and how his experiences this election cycle have gotten him to examine the role and responsibility of media as we enter a second Trump administration.

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This election has been about immigrants in so many ways. The Republican campaign was about demonizing immigrants, from undocumented people to asylum seekers to residents to naturalized citizens. And the exit polls suggest a significant shift in voting among immigrants to the right, and that’s come as a surprise to people who may not have been keeping an eye on that all along.

Were you expecting this result, and if so, does it upend your expectations, and does it change how you think about your work looking into the future?

There was a lot to unpack this past week, but I can't say that our reporters were surprised by some of the things that they heard. Just to give you some context for what happened on Tuesday, we sent reporters out across the city to go to different polling stations in the city and speak to the three communities that we focus on — Spanish-speaking immigrants, Chinese immigrants, Caribbean immigrants — who were voting that day and hear how they were voting and what was motivating their votes.

We were sitting in the office, and we had two editors who were receiving incomings from the staff in the field — and every message back to the editors was like, "I'm voting for Trump. I'm voting for Trump. I'm voting for Trump." They were sending in quotes from the people they were speaking to, and it was just consistent across the board. The vast majority of folks they spoke to said they were voting for Trump. 

We did feel this coming. In the summer we did a poll of our WeChat subscribers; we run a publication on WeChat, which is used by the Chinese diaspora here. And I think around 60 percent said that they were going to vote Republican. Specifically in the Chinese community, we have been seeing this rightward shift over the past few years, driven by two main areas: public safety and the asylum seekers arriving in New York City. 

So what are people saying about their public safety concerns? How does that appear as an issue for that community?