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

Few residents of this Wisconsin small city have seen a migrant but some are blaming Biden for an ‘invasion’ regardless and elsewhere in the state an influx of foreigners is not all it seems

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”.