From the NYT:

How Immigration Foiled Hillary Thomas B. Edsall OCT. 5, 2017

Democrats point to a thousand reasons that Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election. Here is another.

In political circles, it’s common knowledge that in four key states President Trump unexpectedly carried counties that Democratic presidential campaign strategists had failed to recognize as crucial terrain — sparsely populated areas of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. …

What Democrats missed was the profound political impact recent immigration trends were having on the more rural parts of the once homogeneous Midwest — that the region had unexpectedly become a flash point in the nation’s partisan immigration wars.

In a Brookings essay published last month, John C. Austin, director of the Michigan Economic Center, a local think tank, writes that the region is experiencing a “steady stream of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”

In 2013, I drove cross-country and visited Holmes County, Ohio, which is about 45% Amish. The Amish, of course, have very high birthrates and thus are constantly out-migrating from Holmes County, looking for new farmland to buy. (Two days later I pulled up for the evening in rural Grand Junction, Colorado near the Utah border, and, sure enough, there was an Amish family.)

The Amish capital of Ohio would seem like the least likely place for Latino immigrants. And yet in three hours in Holmes County, I saw five five-foot tall MesoAmericans in downtown Millersberg with backpacks, looking like they had just arrived.

In February 2017, Stanley Greenberg, a Democratic pollster and strategist, conducted four postelection focus groups with white voters who had cast ballots for Trump in Macomb County, Michigan, an area he has been studying since 1985. The participants were not Republicans. They were whites without college degrees who identified themselves as independents, as Democratic-leaning independents, or as Democrats who voted for Obama in 2008, 2012 or both.

“Immigration is a powerful issue for these Trump voters, representing a demand that citizens come before noncitizens, Americans before foreigners, and that we take care of home first before abroad,” Greenberg wrote in his  report for The Roosevelt Institute:

Whoever heard of such nonsense?

[Comment at Unz.com]