Rhinelander is closer to the Arctic Circle than Mexico, so it’s no big surprise that few people in the small Wisconsin town have seen the foreign migrants Donald Trump claims to ‘invade’ the country from across the US border, 1,500 miles to the south.
But Jim Schuh, the manager of a local bakery, is nevertheless convinced they are a big problem and is voting accordingly.
“We don’t see immigrants here, but I have relatives across the country and they see them,” he said. ‘That is Biden. He is 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 like Chicago and New York that are struggling to cope with tens of thousands of refugees and other arrivals being transported there by the governors of Texas and Florida.
Related: Mass deportations, detention camps, troops on the streets: Trump outlines a migrant plan
Trump has stoked fears of record levels of migration in Wisconsin, where the past two presidential elections were 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 held two rallies in Wisconsin in the past month where migrants have been the main targets. In Green Bay, he called the issue “bigger than a war” and cited the situation in Whitewater, a small city of about 15,000 in the southern part of the state.
Republican politicians have made Whitewater the poster child for anti-migrant rhetoric in Wisconsin after the city’s police chief, Dan Meyer, appealed for federal help to deal with the arrival of nearly a thousand people from Nicaragua and Venezuela in the past two years can offer.
Meyer made clear in a letter to President Joe Biden in December that he was not hostile to the foreign arrivals, while expressing concern about the “terrible living conditions” some have endured.
“We saw a family living in a 10-by-10-foot shed in temperatures below 10 degrees,” he wrote.
But the police chief said his department was struggling to cope with the number of Spanish-speaking migrants because of the cost of translation software and the time it took to deal with a sharp increase in the number of unlicensed drivers. Meyer also said his officers had responded to serious incidents related to the arrivals, including the death of an infant, assaults and a kidnapping.
However, he told Biden that “none of this information is being shared as a means to denigrate or vilify this group of people… In fact, we see great value in the increasing diversity this group brings to our community.”
That didn’t stop Republican politicians from descending on Whitewater to stoke fear.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, a close Trump ally who has spoken at the former president’s political rallies, and a Republican congressman from the state, Bryan Steil, held a rally in the city to condemn what they described as the “devastating” consequences of the arrival of migrants.
Johnson blamed “the whole issue of the flow of illegal immigrants that have come into this country under the Biden administration.”
Steil declined to support Meyer’s call for federal financial aid, saying the answer lay in legislation to secure the border. However, the congressman was among Republicans who scrapped a bipartisan border security law after Trump opposed the legislation in an apparent attempt to keep the crisis a hot political issue ahead of the presidential election.
Republican members of the Wisconsin Legislature wrote to Biden in January, demanding action over what they claimed was a surge in violent crime in Whitewater, even though Meyer has said he sees no threat to residents from the migrants and that “we are a safe community.”
Some Whitewater residents are outraged by the political intervention. Brienne Brown, a member of the city council for six years, said residents welcomed the migrants, with community organizations providing food, furniture and bedding for many.
“The spotlight fell on us because Ron Johnson and Bryan Steil decided to make it a political event for themselves. Most people here were incredibly angry. They feel like they have been used as a political football,” she said.
“The crime that is occurring is at a super low level, and that is mainly because our police stop someone in a car who does not have a driver’s license.”
The police chief has called for immigrants to be allowed to obtain driver’s licenses, but the Wisconsin Legislature won’t allow it.
Brown said the serious assaults involved domestic violence as well as a woman leaving her newborn baby in a field, and that these types of crimes remained uncommon.
Wisconsin has long relied on immigrant workers, many of them undocumented, as farm workers. Studies have suggested that the state’s dairy farms would grind to a halt without foreign workers. Historically, most came from Mexico. Whitewater tended to attract people from Guanajuato, as migrants from the Mexican state messaged back about job openings.
Brown noticed a change during the Covid crisis.
“I often knocked on doors to talk to my constituents about the pandemic. I noticed that many of them were not from Mexico. They came from Nicaragua and Venezuela,” she said.
Brown said the workers had moved into accommodation left behind by students forced to return home due to the pandemic lockdown.
“We have a lot of farms, a lot of chicken farms, a lot of egg farms. There are factories that make spices, there are factories that can produce food. They are always looking for low paid workers and they never have enough. So there was plenty of work,” she says.
Schuh, like many other Americans who are critical of what they describe as Biden’s open border policies, makes a point to distinguish between those who go through the formal immigration process with a visa and those who cross the border to seek asylum or illegally to work.
“I have nothing against immigrants, but it has to be done the right way,” he said.
Related: Trump Divides Republican Voters as Friends and Family Clash: ‘We Don’t Talk’
Trump continued to stoke the issue at a rally in Michigan earlier this month when he blamed Biden for the murder of Ruby Garcia in March. The former president claimed his administration deported the man who confessed to the shooting, Brandon Ortiz-Vite, and that “corrupt Joe Biden took him back and let him back in and let him stay in and brutally murdered Ruby.” Ortiz-Vite was deported in 2020 after his arrest for drunk driving. It is not clear when he returned to the US.
Trump told the rally that he had spoken to Garcia’s family and that they were “mourning this incredible young woman.” But Garcia’s sister, Mavi, denied that anyone in the family had spoken to the former president and accused him of exploiting the killing for political purposes.
“He didn’t speak to any of us, so it was quite shocking to see that he had said he had spoken to us and that he had misinformed people on live TV,” she told WOOD-TV.
“It was always about illegal immigrants. No one really talks about when Americans commit heinous crimes, and it’s quite shocking why he only brings up illegal things. What about Americans who commit such heinous crimes?”
