Home to more than 10 million migrants, California has more immigrants than any other State in the U.S. The State, where several tech giants are headquartered, houses one in four of the foreign-born people in the U.S. Further, 19 per cent of all Indian immigrants live there.
On Thursday, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump took his anti-immigration campaign to California with a rally where supporters chanted, “build that wall”, referring to the wall that Mr. Trump has promised to build along the U.S.’s southern border with the neighbouring Mexico.
Hundreds of protestors outside raised slogans against Mr. Trump and his “nativist, nationalistic” agenda and clashed with the police and Trump supporters, leading to the arrest of 20 people. The protestors had assembled even as Trump supporters were queuing up to enter the venue, and vandalised police cars. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, “27% of California’s population was foreign-born, about twice the U.S. percentage”. The State has a huge presence of Mexicans — 43 per cent, compared to 29 per cent overall in the country.
Mr. Trump is leading the race in the State, which holds its primary on June 7, by more than 20 points over closest rival Senator Ted Cruz.
Normally, by the time the primaries reach there, the contest is over and the winner known. However, this is no normal election year, and the State that elects 172 delegates to the Republican national convention — the largest in the country — is to play a crucial role in deciding the winner. The last time the California primary influenced the Republican nomination race was in 1964, when it voted Barry Goldwater.
It is ironical that a State that is considered the epicentre of globalised, networked economy is to decide the fate of a candidate whose campaign is built on anti-trade and anti-globalism sentiments.
Two of the four counties in the U.S that account for 15 per cent of total Indian population in the U.S are in California and the Trump campaign is likely to push them further to the side of the Democrats. “While a growing number of Indian-Americans have increasingly supported the GOP in recent years, this support has usually extended to establishment candidates like Bush or Romney. The few Indian-American votes Trump will receive constitute an outlier and isn’t representative of the community,” said Ronak D. Desai, Fellow at New America and an Affiliate at the Belfer Center’s India and South Asia Program at Harvard University.
In a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim politics, Sundar Pichai, the Chennai-born CEO of Google had said in December: “I walk around the campus where I work and see a vibrant mix of races and cultures. Every one of those people has a different voice … a different perspective … a different story to tell. All of that makes our company an exciting and special place to be, and allows us to do great things together.”
But that is not what the Trump supporters want to hear. “Are you ready to build that wall? Are you ready to take back your country? Are you ready to reclaim the well-paying job that you lost,” the emcee asked the rapturous crowd, introducing the candidate in California. The response was loud.
