This Small Rust-Belt City Holds the Secret to Democrats’ Latino Woes
For instance, Morán said, because Latinos have been arriving in Reading for decades, many residents are first- and second-generation Hispanics, some of whom work in professions like health care, the region’s second-largest industry. At the same time, many more recent arrivals are working-class, a lot of whom are drawn to the area to work in factories—Deka battery manufacturing, for instance, or the Giorgio Mushroom Co.—that are within a short drive of the city. Meanwhile, low real estate costs have attracted many other recent arrivals who have opened small businesses here, Morán told me. Among some of these people who aspire to business success, Trump’s folk appeal as a businessman-celebrity appears to resonate.
Case in point: the northeast section of Reading, which boasts the highest concentration of Latinos in the state of Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia, according to one estimate. As we drove through the neighborhood, small Latino businesses were visible everywhere: restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, and lavandarías. It was here, Morán recounted, that he realized something was seriously amiss in the election, when signs saying PUERTO RICANS FOR TRUMP and DOMINICANS FOR TRUMP began to appear.
Among these Dominicans, Morán regularly found that any concerns about Trump’s immigration policies were outweighed by perceptions of his economic prowess. Indeed, that led some Dominicans to develop a particularly hopeful view of Trump. Some came to believe that when Trump talked about not wanting “illegals” in the country, he was really telegraphing that he might pursue some sort of amnesty for the undocumented who don’t merit removal. Amnesty, Morán said, is something they fondly associate with a Republican president, due to Ronald Reagan’s 1986 immigration reform bill. Trumpism, of course, is in many ways a direct repudiation of Reaganism’s American-exceptionalist, city-on-a-hill rhetoric about the virtues of immigration, but apparently that didn’t sink in. “A lot of Dominicans believe that could happen,” Morán told me, speaking of hopes for a Trump amnesty. “I heard that one too many times.”
