It is safe to say that virtually all political professionals think Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is doomed. The odds of him winning the Republican nomination are long and the odds of him winning the general election are nonexistent, they say. The key reason is that Trump’s campaign is based on alienating Latinos, a large and fast-growing voter bloc, by supporting the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and building a wall along the border with Mexico to prevent further emigration. If the eventual Republican nominee needs 47 per cent of the Latino vote to win the general election — the threshold set by two political scientists in a study for Latino Decisions — what chance does Trump have?
But what if Trump could replace Latino votes with those of another large minority group that traditionally votes Democratic? Then he might have a fighting chance at victory. And even without changing his message, black voters could be that group. African-Americans have long been receptive to the anti-immigrant concepts behind Trump’s campaign. Simply put, the jobs, housing and other opportunities that immigrants take come largely at the expense of blacks who were born in the United States.
As long ago as 1881, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained that immigrants from Ireland, the Latinos of the day, were stealing jobs from African-Americans. “Every hour sees us elbowed out of some employment to make room for some newly-arrived emigrant from the Emerald Isle, whose hunger and colour entitle him to special favour,” Douglass wrote in his autobiography. A few years later, in his famous Atlanta Exposition address, Booker T. Washington begged white employers to reject “those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits” in favour of native-born blacks...
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