Event Report: Inside the US election campaigns

Understanding the Immigration Debate and Latino Voter Impact

The evening event in cooperation with AmerikaHaus NRW, which was attended by around 50 participants, focused on the immigration debate and the influence of Latin American immigrants and communities on the US election campaign. While Trump’s immigration policy has become more than clear in recent years – especially verbally – Kamala Harris has not yet presented her own program. Political scientist Dr. Philipp Adorf from the University of Bonn and US journalist Jazmine Ulloa from the New York Times agreed that this election is taking place in an extremely difficult environment for migrants. In particular, the new type of verbal – dehumanizing – communication about migrants is contributing to a radicalization of the election campaign.

The Democrats’ reaction to this was by no means to offer an alternative interpretation; they too participated in a stricter narrative or – as Ulloa criticizes – avoided the topic altogether. In this way, they allowed the Republicans to dominate the debate and take the topic of migration entirely for themselves. Kamala Harris is no exception to this rule. She is following Biden’s example of “pushing to the right” (Jazmine Ulloa), which brings her closer to her early political days with tougher perspectives. In Democratic circles, this rapprochement with Republican positions has certainly met with resistance, and Harris has received a lot of criticism for her migration policy, which she calls a right-wing position. The audience was also very interested in the topic, so that the panel discussion was followed by an exciting discussion with the audience.

Impressions of the Event

Speaker:

Jazmine Ulloa

She is a journalist covering national politics and the 2024 presidential election for The New York Times. She came to the paper from The Boston Globe, where she covered Congress and the 2020 presidential campaign from Washington. A native of El Paso, Texas, she previously worked for newspapers in Brownsville, San Antonio and Austin before joining The Los Angeles Times in its Sacramento bureau. In 2018, she traveled California, highlighting close midterm races, and wrote about the state’s fights with the Trump administration over immigration and the border wall.

Philipp Adorf

Philipp Adorf is a research associate at the University of Bonn. His work focuses on the rise of the Republican Party in the U.S. South since the 1960s, the political consequences of the growth in ethnic diversity in the United States, and the popularity of right-wing populist parties among working-class voters on both sides of the Atlantic.