You’ve probably never heard of him, but CNN’s Harry Enten is an endless source of champagne comedy. Enten, you see, is CNN’s chief data analyst. His job is quite unique in the left-media sphere: cutting through the fog of ‘I Just Reckon’ and reporting the facts. Facts that are so contary to the left’s cosy assumptions that Enten is frequently reduced to a gibbering mess of shouting incomprehension.
The latest data to shock – shock! – Enten is that a huge and growing number of migrants support President Donald Trump’s policy of deporting every illegal immigrant US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) can find.
“The group of voters who became more hawkish on immigration were, in fact, immigrants themselves, immigrants who are registered to vote in this country,” he said.
In just four years, immigrant sentiment toward Trump and the Republican party has shifted dramatically.
“Immigrant citizens, immigrant voters, foreign-born voters have gone tremendously to the right on this issue in 2024 and 2025 versus where they were in 2020,” said Enten.
When asked which party are you closest to or trust more on immigration, Enten said, Democrats had a 32-point lead on this issue in 2020, and “immigrant voters were in the Democratic camp.”
But when you “jump forward to 2024, 2025 – look at that shift,” he continued. “A 40-point shift to the right among immigrant voters! Republicans now lead on this issue by eight points over Democrats, more so than any other group that I could find.”
This is indeed an astonishing shift. One that should alarm Democrats, who have taken it for granted that immigrants will stay on their political plantation. Instead, immigrant voters have shifted harder to the right than any other group of Americans.
“There is no bloc of voters that shifted more to the right from 2020 to 2024 than immigrant voters,” Enten emphasized, “and Donald Trump, at least in some surveys, actually won that vote.”
In Trump’s first campaign in 2016, Enten notes, “immigrant voters were one of his weakest spots”. From just 36 per cent of immigrant voters, Trump improved to 39 per cent in 2020 and 47 per cent in 2024.
How is this possible, the Democrats are wailing. It’s simple: immigrants who came to the USA legally detest queue-jumpers who break the law and get rewarded for it.
In our reporting on the new effects of immigration, ProPublica interviewed dozens of long-established Latino immigrants and their US-born relatives in cities like Denver and Chicago and in small towns along the Texas border. Over and over, they spoke of feeling resentment as they watched the government ease the transition of large numbers of asylum-seekers into the US by giving them access to work permits and IDs, and in some cities spending millions of dollars to provide them with food and shelter.
Imagine being someone who waited patiently, easily years, for a chance at the American Dream. You probably spent thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars, and went through endless rounds of paperwork. If you want your family to join you: more paperwork, more bureaucracy and more fees, more waiting.
Then, with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in charge, some illiterate peon simply strolls across the southern border and gets showered with every imaginable government assistance. Free flights to cities across America, free accommodation in luxury hotels, free English lessons, free healthcare… it goes on and on.
Are you going to be pissed off? You betcha.
Sergio Garza Castillo, a Mexican immigrant who owns a gas station and convenience store in Del Rio, illustrates that political shift. Garza Castillo said he came to the US legally as a teenager in the 1980s after his father, a US citizen, petitioned and waited for more than a decade to bring his family across the border […]
He said he began to turn away from the Democrats in September 2021, when nearly 20,000 mostly Haitian immigrants seeking asylum waded across the Rio Grande from Mexico and camped out under the city’s international bridge near Garza Castillo’s gas station. Federal authorities had instructed the immigrants to wait there to be processed; some remained there for weeks, sleeping under tarps and blankets with little access to water and food. Garza Castillo said he and other business owners lost money when the federal government shut down the international bridge, an economic engine for Del Rio.
Some of the Haitian migrants were eventually deported; others were allowed into the US to pursue asylum claims and given notices to appear in court in a backlogged immigration system that can take years to resolve a case. “That to me is offensive for those who have been living here for more than 10 years and haven’t been able to adjust their status,” Garza Castillo said.
Another immigrant, ‘Valadez’ recalls one of her children finding a lost purse.
Inside they found a Wisconsin driver’s license, a work permit issued to a Nicaraguan woman and $300 in cash. Seeing the contents filled Valadez with bitterness. She asked her son to turn in the purse to the police but kept the $300.
Astonishingly, Democrats clearly believe that violent insurrectionists turning Los Angeles into a battleground, burning American flags and waving Mexican ones, is going to win the hearts and minds of these already pissed-off legal immigrants.
