| This week's MapLab comes from Elena Mejía, a Bloomberg graphics reporter who recently analyzed immigration patterns in swing states. At campaign stops in Michigan and Wisconsin earlier this year, Donald Trump made headlines for dehumanizing statements about immigrants illegally in the US. "Every town is now a border town because Joe Biden has brought the carnage and chaos and killing from all over world and dumped it straight into our backyards," the former president told an audience in Grand Rapids. (This was before Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee.) Trump's style of inflammatory anti-immigrant rhetoric is nothing new. But these comments – which the Republican candidate made in two key swing states that could decide the election – got my colleague and me thinking. How much of an influx of migrants have places like Michigan and Wisconsin recently seen? Another way of putting it: How much are Trump voters in swing states actually exposed to illegal immigration? Senior reporter Shawn Donnan and I decided to come up with an answer. We started looking at asylum case data from the Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review, released after public records requests by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering and research organization at Syracuse University. The dataset provides a comprehensive look at the 1.8 million pending court cases of migrants who turned themselves in at the border in 2023, including the addresses of where they planned on settling. Using that address data, we looked at the number of migrants who settled in every county in the US last year, and used vote margin data from the 2020 election to see how many were going to Democrat- or Republican-leaning counties.  A cartogram showing the share of migrants in 2023 who settled in red versus blue counties, by state. Elena Mejía/Bloomberg News In the seven swing states crucial to this year's election, we found that counties that voted for Trump in 2020 received less than a third of asylum-seeking immigrants who crossed the border in 2023. The rest went to counties that voted for Biden – in keeping with a longstanding pattern of immigrants settling in more populous, left-leaning areas. You can see that in one of the maps we created, below.  A map showing the counties in seven swing states that received any number of migrants in 2023. Counties are sized according to the number of migrant addresses, and colored by the winning party in the 2020 election. Credit: Elena Mejía/Bloomberg News We also looked at data measuring the foreign-born and overall populations in swing state counties, as well as the local GDP, to get a sense of the social and economic fabric. Looking closer at red-leaning counties where relatively few migrants have recently settled, we found that many are struggling with population declines, labor shortages and a local GDP that hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. That suggests red-leaning counties are losing out on asylum seekers as a potential workforce to help bolster their economies and draw new investment. In contrast, 85% of migrants who settled in swing states settled in counties where GDP grew from 2019 to 2022. We charted this by visualizing the number of migrant addresses linked to swing state counties in 2023 as differently sized squares, then plotted those squares based on their change in GDP from 2019 to 2022. Counties that had negative GDP growth received very few migrants, and the vast majority of those counties – 88% – were won by Trump in 2020.  A chart showing GDP percentage change from 2019 to 2022 for each swing state county where migrants settled, colored by whether the county's GDP saw growth or decline, sized by the number of migrants in 2023. Credit: Elena Mejía/Bloomberg News Since 2021, border-crossers have increasingly turned themselves in to apply for asylum, making the dataset we used more exhaustive compared to previous years when more migrants successfully evaded Border Patrol agents. Still, there are limitations to the data: Addresses may be invalid in some cases, and some asylum court records do not include an address. Our analysis reveals that migrants aren't going to swing states as much as they are to other parts of the country – and those that are are primarily flocking to blue counties. More importantly, we found Trump's xenophobic narratives don't reflect daily life in the places where many of his supporters live – in fact, there aren't that many immigrants there to begin with. This wouldn't be the first time that political rhetoric on this issue has failed to match reality. Still, in this year's tight race for the White House, many voters are highly receptive to Trump's messaging. -
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