To better understand Donald Trump’s surging appeal among immigrant voters a friend suggested that I visit a particular corner of Staten Island, where an astonishingly diverse population, clustered around a set of minority-owned businesses, has recently emerged on a stretch of Hylan Boulevard.
This was Trump country, if not in purest distillation, then in a formidable iteration of it: The former president won Staten Island by 15 percentage points when he ran against Joe Biden, leading by more than 50 points in some precincts. But the whole of Staten Island no longer conformed to the accompanying stereotype. Between 2008 and 2022, according to Census data, the white population around this section of Hylan Boulevard declined from 75 percent to 60. And there have been significant changes even in the last two years. The question now was whether devotion to the former president in a MAGA-centric part of the world was undermined by an infusion of people conceivably alienated by his racist rhetoric.
That rhetoric dominated Sunday’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where one speaker called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” and a litany of casual disparagement targeted African Americans, Jews and Palestinians. The day before, a New York Times/Siena College poll showed Vice President Kamala Harris holding an advantage of 39 percentage points over Mr. Trump in New York City, an overwhelming edge that nevertheless stood in significantly low contrast to Democratic support in 2020, when Mr. Biden won the city by 53 points.
The stretch of Hylan Boulevard running through the adjoining neighborhoods of Dongan Hills, Grant City and Midland Beach could easily be mistaken for parts of Queens, given its ethnic range. Chinese, Filipino, Nigerian, Lebanese and Egyptian immigrants have been joined in recent years by an increasing number of Palestinian and Yemeni families. What might seem like an unusual convergence of opinion took hold.
In Dongan Hills, where Trump signs line the front lawns of single-family houses, the Muslim American Society of Staten Island opened a $7 million community center in March. Not far off, two Palestinian restaurants exist within a few blocks of each other. One of them, Ayat, is part of a chain with a branch in Allentown, Pa. Another smaller one, Al Aqsa, is a falafel house named for the mosque in Haram al-Sharif and also quite popular. A sign on the front door announces support for the Palestinian cause.
I went in and met the owner, Moe Musa, who expressed support for the Donald Trump cause. Like many small business owners, he was drawn to Mr. Trump as a businessman; research from New American Economy, an organization focused on immigration policy, tells us that Middle Eastern and North African immigrants tend to be entrepreneurs at higher rates than other immigrant groups and Americans. He appreciated how the former president handled Covid, he said, and he held the Biden administration complicit in the devastation of Gaza.
Fewer than two blocks away, another Middle Eastern restaurant, Yemen Cafe, opened a few months ago. One of its two owners, Alssedieg Nassir, explained the political tenor in his community to me: “There’s a misunderstanding among a lot of people who automatically think that Arabs are not for Trump. Just because a girl is wearing a hijab, don’t assume her party.” The war was paramount among his concerns. “We’re praying that Trump will do something different,” he said. “I’m not saying he is going to be the savior, but the party here, now, isn’t doing jack.”
Mr. Trump has, in fact, spent some time during the final days of his campaign angling for precisely that sort of response, trying to corral the enthusiasms of an Arab and Muslim cohort he had previously condemned. As recently as this summer, he falsely claimed that Ms. Harris planned “to deposit thousands of jihadist sympathizers in Minnesota.”
Mr. Nassir, whose parents came to the United States from Yemen in the mid-1970s, was born and grew up in Brooklyn; his family opened the original branch of his cafe on Atlantic Avenue in Cobble Hill in 1986, which he says was the first Yemeni restaurant in the country. I asked him about the anti-immigrant bias coming out of the Trump campaign. He thought it was troubling but not disqualifying. There was no “perfect” candidate, in his view.
When we talked about the ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries that Mr. Trump enacted by executive order a few days after he entered the White House in 2017, Mr. Nassir described how his own thinking had changed. Although he believed the prohibitions were wrong, the migrant crisis he has watched unfold in the city over the past two years had made him understand the situation differently, bringing him to the conclusion that certain kinds of controls might be necessary.
The economy, or what he saw more broadly in terms of working people generally falling behind, bothered him as well. “The saddest thing I see,” he said, “is a 65-year-old delivery man coming in here and saying, ‘Hey, can I pick up Dave’s chicken?’”
In this way, he sounded like an older generation of immigrant business owners in the neighborhood, who see a second Trump presidency as the only way forward.
He sounded something like Marcos Platis, who came to this country from Greece in 1950 and owns various commercial properties in the area, among them the gigantic Colonnade Diner, which has been on Hyland Boulevard since 1975. He recounted the way his business had been flagging in recent years. Supply costs were high. He wasn’t making enough to take a salary, he said. The catering space he manages used to book three or four parties a week, and now it might get only one. Another Trump term, he believed, would return some sense of vanished optimism.
Whatever else it might revive didn’t seem to matter.
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