Almost everyone in Lockland, Ohio, agrees on this: In the past year and a half, 3,000-plus immigrants from Mauritania, in West Africa, have streamed into the 1.2-square-mile town, taking over apartment buildings, straining police and fire services, and flooding the sewer system.
“They don’t have furniture, so it’s probably just two queen-size mattresses on the floor,” Doug Wehmeyer, Lockland’s fire chief, told me.
The newcomers, who have led to a doubling of Lockland’s population of 3,500, are mostly living in a handful of four-story apartment buildings, with ten to fifteen people squeezed into a four-person unit, Wehmeyer said. The buildings have become cluttered with trash and filled with the fumes of kitchen fires caused by too much cooking grease, Mark Mason, Lockland’s mayor, told me.
If the Mauritanians ever leave, the mayor said, the buildings will have to be razed.
“I don’t know how Lockland survives,” Wehmeyer added.
But this is what people inside—and outside—of Lockland don’t agree on: who brought these newcomers here and why, and what it all portends for America.
Is it simply another wave of immigration that will benefit from and strengthen our melting-pot nation? Or is it, as some Republicans and Elon Musk, one of Donald Trump’s chief backers, claim: a nefarious Democratic plot to bring illegal immigrants to swing states, and even red states, and eventually turn them blue?
If you’ve heard, over the past few weeks, Musk and others suggest that a Kamala Harris victory means this will be the last election—this is what they are referring to. Not the idea that Democrats will cancel elections—which is what Democrats say Trump will do if he prevails—but that a demographic shift means Team Blue will always win every election.
Lockland, after all, is one of many towns—like Springfield, Ohio; Charleroi, Pennsylvania; and Aurora, Colorado—that have seen a huge influx of Mauritanians, Haitians, Venezuelans, Colombians, and others in recent years. To conservatives like Mike Howell of the conservative Heritage Foundation, the only reason for this is a scheme to gerrymander the vote and “usher in a Marxist revolution.”
“That is the plan, to have an openly international election,” Howell, who monitors progressive immigration policy for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., told me. “Get a ton of people into the country, and then also simultaneously, aggressively fight against measures of election integrity to prevent them from voting.”
Doug Wehmeyer, the fire chief in Lockland, Ohio, said he has “no idea” whether immigrants are being sent to Lockland to help reelect Democratic senator Sherrod Brown and give Harris Ohio’s seventeen Electoral College votes.
But according to Donald Trump, the plan in Ohio—and everywhere else new migrants now live—is obvious. “Our elections are bad,” Trump declared in his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, in Philadelphia. Referring to Democrats, he said, “And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote, they can’t even speak English, they don’t even know what country they’re in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”
The former president added: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.”
Earlier this month, while campaigning for Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk declared that after four more years of the Harris “puppet regime, they’re actually gonna legalize so many illegals in the swing states that there won’t be swing states anymore.”
He noted that California Democrats, who control the governorship and state legislature, recently passed a law barring municipalities from requiring voter identification. “If the Dems win, they’ll ban voter ID nationwide,” Musk said. “That’s why I think, if Trump doesn’t win, this is the last election.” (Musk did not mention that the GOP will likely hold on to the Senate in 2024, which would make it impossible for a future President Harris to pass sweeping legislation.)
Democrats have so far sidestepped Trump’s and Musk’s charges. When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked Harris about the White House border policy in his interview with her on October 16, Harris responded—accurately—that Republicans tanked a border-security bill late last year after Trump came out against it. (Baier did not mention any talk of Democrats manipulating border policy to win elections.) Senator Sherrod Brown, despite the stiff reelection challenge he faces in Ohio, has struck a more conciliatory tone. “Presidents of both parties have failed on the border—including the Biden administration,” he said in a statement in May.
Nonetheless, this fear that the White House has opened the floodgates to the unwashed masses illegally crossing the southern border—there have been roughly 8 million encounters with immigrants crossing the southern border since Biden took office, versus 2.4 million under Trump—and steered them toward politically competitive states in order to transform the electoral chessboard has hardened into dogma among many Trump supporters. It has also provided them with a kind of license to protest any election result they don’t like.
“Of course we win—unless the election is rigged” was a common refrain at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July. Viewed through this lens, one doesn’t have to buy the conspiracy theory that Dominion’s voting machines were rigged to ensure Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The rigging, as it were, is happening organically at the border in plain sight.
Earlier this month, a video surfaced showing how fears over a plot to steal the election are percolating in Lockland. Posted on the town’s Facebook page by someone named Chickie Chickie, a man in a Trump T-shirt says of Democratic hopes for the Mauritanians: “They don’t want them to stay in the blue states. They want to get them into the red states to turn us blue.”
“This isn’t just a couple of cities,” adds the narrator of the video, produced by right-wing production outfit Real America’s Voice. “This is everywhere.”
No one making these claims that I spoke to—and I spoke to five leading voices from conservative think tanks—has produced any smoking guns: an email from the Harris campaign, leaked audio or video, an incriminating text. “Nobody is sitting around in George Soros’s mountain lair writing up the plan,” Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, told me.
Krikorian doubts there’s a conspiracy but he says that’s beside the point: More immigrants means more Democratic victories at the ballot box. “I’m skeptical” that there’s an actual progressive plot, he said. “But I’m not skeptical of the end result.”
There is so much “circumstantial evidence” it is hard not to jump to conclusions, Joshua Treviño, chief transformation officer at the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, in Austin, told me.
Conservatives note that progressives have long opposed efforts to stymie the influx of illegal immigrants—starting with Democratic “sanctuary city” mayors’ refusal to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials when Trump was president. Then there’s Joe Biden’s reversal of Trump’s decision to bar illegal immigrants from the 2020 Census, and the dramatic uptick in the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States under Biden—from a little more than 400,000 in 2020 to more than 2 million in 2021.
In recent years, they say, signs that progressives are packing the vote have mounted. They include:
Democrats enabling undocumented immigrants to vote in local elections, blurring the distinction between citizen and noncitizen. In California, in 2023, a Court of Appeal ruled in favor of a 2016 San Francisco measure enabling noncitizens with children to vote in school board elections. In November, voters in once-Republican Orange County, in Southern California, will vote on a measure permitting noncitizens to vote in local elections. New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, and other cities have tried but so far failed to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections.
State governments such as Minnesota and Rhode Island—mostly controlled by progressives—are enabling undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses, which puts them closer to the ability to vote. (This applies only to state and local elections, as a 1996 federal law prevents noncitizens from voting in national elections.) While Washington State made it possible to obtain a driver’s license without a Social Security number in 1993, and New Mexico followed suit in 2003, there has been a rise in noncitizen-voting states more recently, with 19 states and Washington, D.C., now making it possible. Meanwhile, on October 1, California went one step further, with Governor Gavin Newsom signing into law a measure barring cities from requiring identification to vote. (It’s unclear how many noncitizens have cast ballots in state or municipal elections. The number of noncitizens voting illegally is vanishingly low.)
The Biden administration is processing noncitizens’ naturalization applications at the fastest rate in history. It’s not unusual in the lead-up to an election for more people to apply for citizenship and the right to vote, but the Biden administration has made a point of streamlining the process, hiring more staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and shortening the application from 20 pages to 14. In the first nine months of 2024, it took 4.9 months to get an application processed versus 11.5 months in 2021.
All of these various ballot measures and bureaucratic maneuverings and political initiatives “feed a rational conspiratorialism,” said Treviño at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Treviño said Sister Norma Pimentel, executive director of the Rio Grande Valley branch of the progressive group Catholic Charities USA, has played a key role in moving immigrants across the border and resettling them in the United States. “I’ve heard her described as a ‘plaza boss,’ ” he said—a term for “the cartel man in charge of an area.” (Among others, Pope Francis has praised Pimentel for helping immigrants “fleeing from true social hells.”)
Pimentel did not reply to a Free Press request for comment.
“It’s not crazy,” Treviño said, “to start to ask questions like, ‘What’s the intent behind this?’ ”
In recent months, Republicans have sought to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls in Georgia, Alabama, Nevada, Michigan, and Virginia, but Democrats have pushed back, accusing Republicans of trying to sow distrust in the electoral process. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice filed suit against Virginia on the grounds that it had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 with its “list maintenance efforts.” Republican governor Glenn Youngkin responded that his state was simply trying to “make sure that only citizens vote in Virginia.”
Erasing Charleroi—a short movie about the little town 30 minutes south of Pittsburgh that has recently absorbed several waves of Haitian immigrants—strikes an even darker tone.
In the video, a local man, accompanied by an ominous soundtrack, describes vans mysteriously shuttling Haitian immigrants around town. The culprit appears to be a local food-packaging company called Fourth Street Foods—whose crime seems to be importing cheap labor.
Nate Hochman, the right-wing filmmaker who produced Erasing Charleroi, insisted there was nothing veiled or surprising about progressives colluding with business to bring in more immigrants.
“They’ve been boasting about how immigration is going to create bulletproof majorities for a generation—that is how they see immigration,” Hochman told me, referring to Democrats. He cited a 2019 piece by Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton entitled “California’s Changing Demographics Will Further Doom Republicans,” and a 2018 piece from New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called “We Can Replace Them,” as evidence.
But it stretched back much further than that, Hochman added. He pointed to the influential book The Emerging Democratic Majority, by John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, published in 2002. The book argues that growing Latino and Asian communities would lead to a new Democratic era starting around 2008. Barack Obama’s historic victory that year seemed like a powerful vindication of this thesis.
But when I asked Teixeira himself about Republican fears that Democrats are trying to rig elections via immigration policy, he said: “I think it’s basically bullshit.”
Teixeira, a political scientist who formerly worked at progressive think tanks and is now a fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., noted that “we made no claim in the book that this was part of a deliberate plan on the part of Democrats to juice their electorate.”
More recently, Judis and Teixeira have argued that Democrats have lost the plot—succumbing to the influence of Wall Street and progressives’ “cultural radicalism”—which will only cost them votes.
Nor do the new arrivals appear to be adhering to the nightmarish playbook outlined by Trump and Musk. After they arrive in the United States, most immigrants head to Texas, Florida, New York, or California, Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told me—two red states, two blue. And none that are especially competitive in our national elections.
And there is no consensus on how these recently naturalized citizens vote.
“If you look at the trend in terms of Democratic support, particularly among Hispanics, it’s not favorable to the idea that if you simply bring in more of these people they’re going to vote for Democrats the way they did in 2012,” Teixeira told me. He said Hispanics are moving from a “2 to 1” preference for the Democrats to a more even split of “55 to 45.”
But Treviño at the Texas Public Policy Foundation said this is all missing a deeper point. “What this entire conversation is about is whether the people of a nation have a right to define who their neighbors and fellow citizens are,” he said. “Even if you could establish with ironclad empiricism that admitting several million folks from overseas would result in conservative policies forever, I don’t think that would be enough to persuade those of us on the conservative side.”
What the America First crowd doesn’t understand, Teixeira said, is that the effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965—which enabled large numbers of Latin American and Asian immigrants, among others, to come to the U.S.—“are complex.” All of the Biden administration’s policies on this issue, including limiting deportations, just reflects “a very liberal attitude toward immigration.”
This attitude, and all the policies that spring from it, Teixeira said, “have a lot of unintended consequences.”
He added: “It’s all fucked up, to use a technical term.”
Those unintended consequences are felt everywhere in Lockland, said Mayor Mark Mason, who calls himself an independent. He described how Mauritanians are dialing 911 not to report an emergency but to get a ride to the doctor. He told me about the loiterers on the sidewalks, the new kids crowding into classrooms, and the cultural chasms—the resentment and anger between townspeople and their new neighbors.
“We do have issues with how they treat females, because they’re Muslim,” Mason said of the Mauritanians. “They believe that females are beneath them. There’s no effort on their part to learn our culture, let alone our language.” A female town official was forced to call the police after several Mauritanians harassed her in the street, Wehmeyer, the fire chief, confirmed.
Zeke Hernandez, a Wharton business-administration professor who has studied the impact of immigration on labor markets, called these disruptions part of the “congestion” that comes with growth—not all that dissimilar to the chaos that engulfed New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the last century.
Responding to fears—stoked by Trump and his running mate, Senator J.D. Vance—that foreigners are taking jobs from Americans, Hernandez said: “You want an economy that is creating jobs for everybody. You don’t want a zero-sum game. I share that sentiment. But the way you harm native workers the most is by keeping immigrants out.”
A growing chorus of right-of-center organizations—the National Immigration Forum, the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force, Women of Welcome, and others—is pushing back against the MAGA right’s theories on how their political opponents are using immigration as a new form of gerrymandering. This includes evangelicals, business leaders, and old-fashioned Republicans whose views are closer to those of Ronald Reagan.
Tom Thompson, a U.S. Air Force veteran and the chief of the Sinclair College Police Department in Dayton, a half-hour from Lockland, is part of that constellation of voices. Thompson voted for Trump in 2016, but was turned off by the anger. In 2020, he backed Biden. This year, Harris.
“My favorite president of all time is George W. Bush. I really like his demeanor,” he told me.
Over the past several years, Thompson said, Dayton and its surrounding Montgomery County had absorbed 30,000 immigrants—from China, Afghanistan, Turkey, sub-Saharan Africa, and Mexico. They had come on student visas, and some of them were undocumented, he said.
On balance, he welcomed the newcomers. “It’s good for us,” Thompson said. “We’ll see more blended families.” He noted that he and his wife had adopted their oldest son as a teenager from the Central African Republic. His son went on to play professional basketball, mostly in Europe, and is now in his forties and living in San Antonio.
Were it not for immigrants, Thompson added, Montgomery County, like so many hollowed-out, post-industrial counties across the middle of America, would hemorrhage people and money. The newcomers, he said, had brought new foods, new languages, new blood, and new ideas for businesses that had yet to be created.
He was not surprised that so many immigrants wound up in Ohio or Pennsylvania or elsewhere in the Midwest.
“Typically, it’s because the cost of living is so much lower, and the opportunity to have jobs at factories and jobs where you don’t need to be proficient in English is higher,” said Thompson.
Meanwhile, he was feeling discouraged by all the politicians—the unsubstantiated rumors about “people eating other people’s pets in Springfield,” “the absolutely hateful, disgusting rhetoric.”
Thompson feared that the emotions unleashed by the immigration debate will be hard to contain. “I think people are just revved up,” he told me. He meant on the campaign trail, online, on social media.
“There’s going to be a lot of anger and hate, and I don’t know that we can do anything about it. It’s going to be a big ball of yuck.”
Peter Savodnik is a writer for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece “Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar.’ ”
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