Migrants, real and imagined, grip US voters, 1,500 miles north of border

Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than to Mexico, so it is no great surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin city have laid eyes on the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims are “invading” the country from across the US border 1,500 miles to the south.

But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nonetheless sure they are a major problem and he’s voting accordingly.

“We don’t see immigrants here but I have relatives all over the country and they see them,” he said. “That’s Biden. He’s responsible.”

Large numbers of voters in key swing states agree with Schuh, even in places where migrants are hard to find as they eye cities such as Chicago and New York struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.

Trump has been pushing fears over record levels of migration hard in Wisconsin where the past two presidential elections have been decided by a margin of less than 1% of the vote. A Marquette law school poll last month found that two-thirds of Wisconsin voters agree that “the Biden administration’s border policies have created a crisis of uncontrolled illegal migration into the country”.

Trump has twice held rallies in Wisconsin over the past month at which migrants have been a primary target. In Green Bay he called the issue “bigger than a war” and invoked the situation in Whitewater, a small city of about 15,000 residents in the south of the state.

Republican politicians have turned Whitewater into the poster child for anti-migrant rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal assistance to cope with the arrival of nearly 1,000 people from Nicaragua and Venezuela over the past two years.

Meyer