is base.
79 percent of those who voted for him in the 2016 presidential elections favoured building a wall across the entire frontier, according to a Pew Research Center survey. However, Trump’s strongest support is in areas where immigration is it at its lowest. For example, of all American states, his highest share of the vote in 2016 – at 68.5 percent – was in West Virginia, where immigrants constituted just 1.6 percent of the population according to 2015 figures.
Many Trump voters are “not really seeing what’s going on”, Frey commented. “Because the actual reality is detached from people’s stereotypes, they’re not really focused on Asians as much as Hispanics. You don’t see Trump talking about Asians very much – it’s off the radar.”
A “class element” also explains the nativist focus on Latin American as opposed to Asian immigrants, argued James Hollifield, an immigration specialist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Because the latter tend to be “highly educated”, the “dynamic that says these people are coming in and stealing jobs hasn’t really taken hold in the same way that people talk about Central Americans, for example, who are often without status, often at the bottom of the labour market”, he told FRANCE 24.
Nevertheless, Wong cautioned that “there’s always going to be this suspicion based on phenotypic differences and that kind of attitude is triggered pretty fast”, while “some research suggests that if you present people with evidence of demographic change, they become more supportive of restrictive [immigration] policies”.
Non-Hispanic whites will be a minority by 2045
The current wave of Asian immigration forms part of a long-term trend, in which the rise of the overall ethnic minority population is projected to make non-Latino whites a minority in the US by 2045.
Historically, large immigration flows to the country have meant that “until minorities are assimilated, until they’re seen as part of the majority, you’ve got pressure that’s going to build up like it did with southern and eastern European immigration from the 1890s to the 1920s”, Eric Kaufmann, a political demographer at Birkbeck College, University of London and the author of "Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities", told FRANCE 24. “But when this demographic pressure lifts, it does so quite quickly – as it did from the ’50s to the ’80s, when intermarriage took off”.
“Once people get used to a city or a county or a state working well, even if there is a very diverse population with a non-Hispanic white minority group, as it is in Los Angeles, then it’s fine,” Goldstone concluded.