Several studies show that146 Americans view immigrants who speak English more favorably than those who speak other languages. Worries about English being dethroned are a key motivator of anti-immigrant sentiment. (It’s not just in the U.S., either. Cultural similarity is so important to the acceptance of immigrants that Swiss authorities once ran an ad campaign featuring an African migrant arriving to work on time each day,147 as if to emphasize that Africans can be just like the timely Swiss.) “If assimilation into the host society is a central norm that immigrants are commonly perceived to violate, language is perhaps the most visible signal of that norm,” write Jens Hainmueller and Daniel J. Hopkins in their study on this topic.148 It turns out we don’t want to safeguard our jobs so much as our norms.

What happened in Trempealeau County seems closest to what Hopkins described in a 2010 paper:149 hostility toward immigrants rises when communities undergo an influx of immigrants and when national leaders are at the same time talking about how dangerous immigrants are. What’s more, few of those immigrants to Trempealeau County spoke English as a first language. Intensifying matters, when people have negative experiences with other ethnic or religious groups, they are more likely to connect those experiences to the person’s ethnicity and generalize those negative attributes150 to the rest of the group.

In 2016, not long after Trump called Mexicans rapists, and after Latinos had moved in at a rapid pace, Trempealeau County had the perfect storm for hostility toward outsiders. In 2016, Trempealeau County went for Trump.

“If you’d seen the way things have changed in this town,” one fifty-one-year-old Arcadian told the Wall Street Journal that year,151 “you’d say, ‘Something needs to be done about it.’” One resident of Arcadia derided “border jumpers” to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2016152 and said he wanted Trump to “just make it where it was, where a working white guy has a chance.” Another woman told the paper, “There are too many Hispanics here that are trying to overpower all of us.”

It wasn’t just Trempealeau County, of course. As Peter Schrag put it, as Latino immigrants moved from traditional immigrant destinations like California and Arizona to the Midwest, “the backlash spread with them.”153

After the 2016 election, Gloria noticed that some Latinos were leaving Trempealeau County for Canada.

Victoria, a twenty-five-year-old Mexican woman, has lived in Arcadia since she was nine years old. (I’m using a pseudonym for her because the future of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the program she relies upon to stay in the country, has been in jeopardy in recent years.) Back in grade school, she estimates, there were only about five other Hispanic students in her school. She remembers other kids being surprised that there were kids in existence who didn’t know English. When her brother started kindergarten in Wisconsin, he was embarrassed to bring Mexican food for lunch.