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Immigrants help power America’s economy. Will the election value or imperil them?

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BAKER, Nev. (AP) — Few things say America like Janille and Tom Baker’s ranch, with its grazing cattle, scrub brush-dotted desert and snow-capped mountains.

If only they could get American citizens to work on it.

The ranch in remote eastern Nevada produces around 10,000 tons of hay annually, and combines cowboy culture with a dash of Manifest Destiny. Rabbits, gophers and the occasional badger always outnumber humans and the nighttime sky is dark enough to count the stars.

But the Bakers’ business couldn’t survive without an agricultural guest worker program that brings in Mexican immigrants for about nine months a year to help harvest crops in fields where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).

“When people complain that foreign workers are taking their jobs, I roll my eyes,” said Janille Baker, who manages the ranch’s accounting. “In any industry, everybody’s trying to find help. So this anti-immigration stance doesn’t really make sense to me. If everyone needs workers, how are you planning to fill those jobs?” The ranch follows federal rules that require advertising available positions and making them available first to U.S. citizens. But in the last six years, only two Americans called to inquire about jobs. A third trekked out in person, but left after seeing what the work entailed.

Immigration has become a source of fright and frustration for voters in this presidential election — with possible outcomes that could take the United States down two dramatically different paths. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in Nevada, where 19% of residents are foreign-born and around 9% of the total workforce doesn’t have U.S. legal status.

The influx of illegal border crossings has strained city and state resources across the nation, even in Democratic strongholds. And yet immigration has fueled job growth in ways that strengthen the economy and improve the federal government’s fiscal health.

So black and white in the candidates’ rhetoric, immigration is actually incredibly complex in reality — a fact that reveals itself every day in Nevada.

Voters say it is among their most important issues in November. How they come down on immigration, choosing former President Donald Trump ’s hard-line proposals for mass deportations or Vice President Kamala Harris ‘ calls for a path to citizenship for millions of people in the country illegally who have been here for years, will go a long way toward determining the outcome.

Nearly 300 miles or 480 kilometers south of Baker Ranch, neon-saturated Las Vegas had almost 41 million tourists visit last year, and is seeing the issue of immigration play out differently, but with distinct parallels.

“There’s a lot of fear,” said Nancy Valenzuela, a 48-year-old maid who works at the Strat casino. “There are people who don’t have papers. They’re like, ‘They want to throw us all out.’”

Valenzuela plans to vote for Harris. But others can only watch and hope their way of life isn’t turned upside down. “We’re here, propping up the country so the economy doesn’t crash,” said Haydee Zetino, who scrubs lavish hotel suites at Harrah’s Casino on the famed Las Vegas strip. She is an immigrant from El Salvador with only temporary protected U.S. status and can’t vote.

Absolutes sweep away nuance

If Trump deported all 11 million immigrants without legal status in the U.S., as he has suggested, the collateral risk could extend to the entire economy. Nevada’s job losses alone might nearly equal what it suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. More than 10% of Nevada’s population lives in homes with at least one immigrant in the country illegally, according to estimates from the advocacy group Fwd.us.

“In our wonderful, 24-hour economy, we know that these hotels and casinos could not, should not, would not be able to open every day without immigrants,” said Peter Guzman, president and CEO of the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Nevada.

Trump could also revive pushes he made during his first term to cancel programs that have extended temporary legal status to Zetino and hundreds of thousands of others.

Harris has called for humane treatment at the border, particularly for children and families, and for letting longtime immigrants get citizenship. But she’s also promised to revive a bipartisan package that Trump forced congressional Republicans to squash, which sought to provide $20 billion for immigration enforcement and tightened rules for immigrants seeking U.S. asylum.

Recent Biden administration orders have imposed asylum restrictions when the border is overwhelmed. The vice president recently walked the border with Mexico in Douglas, Arizona, and called for getting tougher than Biden has — despite his administration having seen arrests for illegal border crossings fall sharply in recent months, even approaching levels recorded during Trump’s final year in the White House.

Polling released last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research showed Trump has an advantage over the vice president on who voters trust to better handle immigration 44% vs. 37% — a gap Harris’ campaign has sought to narrow by moving harder to the middle on the issue.

Immigrants say a bipartisan push toward getting tougher at the border has clouded the larger issue in ways often too complicated to break down easily along ideological lines.

“I think that our focus is completely directed into the border and not toward the people who are already here and have been here for many, many years,” said Erika Marquez, immigrant justice organizer for the advocacy group Make the Road Nevada, and a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-area effort giving limited protections to immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

The Pew Research Center estimates that 11 million people in the country illegally live in the U.S. Big states like California, Texas and Florida have larger numbers who potentially could have even more influence on workforces and communities. But all of those states are all solidly red or blue in presidential races — and aren’t likely to sway the election as toss-up Nevada might.

Clark County, encompassing Las Vegas, is about 75% of the state’s population and includes a sizeable number of hospitality industry workers represented by Nevada’s powerful Culinary Union, which has endorsed Harris.

But Trump is hoping to turn out infrequent voters there, and do very well in much of the rest of the state, which tends to be rural and conservative. Washoe County, home to Reno, is a perennial toss-up, though. And voters can also choose “None” of the presidential candidates, adding to the Nevada electorate’s famously fickle nature.

Maria Nieto, president of the Young Democrats of Nevada, also got Obama-era protections for immigrants who arrived as children. She said she was always taught while growing up never to talk about her legal status. Now, however, Nieto, is making a point of using her story to motivate people to exercise voting rights she doesn’t have.

“At times, I think that people don’t realize how personal this is,” she said.

The post-Election Day economic consequences might be even more dire.

A group of researchers led by Warwick J. McKibbin, an economics professor at the Australian National University, found that removing workers in the U.S. illegally would sharply reduce labor supply in the mining, agriculture, services, and manufacturing sectors. Deporting even 7.5 million workers might slash Real Gross Domestic Product by 12%.

If Nevada lost all of its workers in the country illegally, Labor Department figures suggest the direct job losses would be roughly as large as those from the 2008 financial crisis, which stalled tourism, triggered a wave of housing market foreclosures and cost the state about 9.3% of its jobs during the subsequent Great Recession.

And rounding up people in the country illegally may not even count people like Zetino, Marquez, and Nieto, nor the guest workers at Baker Ranch, all of whom are authorized to be in the U.S.

Zetino, 62, gained temporary protected status since arriving after a major 2001 earthquake in El Salvador, but saw Trump try to remove it during his term.

“These people don’t have any conscience,” she said of mass deportation supporters. “They believe they can lift up the country, move the economy forward, but they don’t think of those at the bottom.”

‘No issue with people who want to come here legally’

Trump has made border security an unofficial anthem of his campaign, constantly decrying an “ invasion ” of people flooding into the country illegally. At the same time, he’s endorsed more temporary visas for qualified foreigners, saying at a recent town hall with Spanish-language Univision, “We want workers, and we want them to come in, but they have to come in legally, and they have to love our country.”

But the former president also has lately stepped up his attacks on people with temporary protected status, including spreading falsehoods about Haitians legally living in Ohio abducting and eating pets, and threatening to deport them should he win in November. Trump has further stoked tensions by suggesting that immigrants coming into the U.S. illegally are doing so to expressly take jobs from Black and Hispanic Americans.

Still, some of Trump’s top supporters in Nevada are more careful to make distinctions between immigrants here legally and not. That includes former North Las Vegas Mayor John Lee, who has been endorsed by Trump as he runs for Congress and acknowledged of his state: “We are running out of labor force right now.”

“We have no issue with people who want to come here legally,” Lee said. “We’ll train them and they’ll work, and we see all the joys of America that way.” But he said people in the country illegally, by contrast, have contributed to higher crime rates, including construction sites being burglarized.

Other conservatives are more explicit about the economic damage tougher immigration policies might do, though.

Guzman, of the Latin chamber, has organized forums examining how construction in Las Vegas has been slowed by not being able to find enough workers. He’s pushed for expanding guest worker programs, noting on a call with an advocacy group, “I’m a registered Republican, and we are not all the same on this issue.”

Florisela López Rivera has seen that nuance firsthand and worries about politics overwhelming decency.

A dishwasher at Wynn Casino in Las Vegas, López Rivera is originally from El Salvador and got temporary protected status after Hurricane Mitch’s devastation in 1998. She recently gained permanent U.S. residency after her wife became a citizen, which means she’s unlikely to face deportation under any circumstances.

López Rivera is a member of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000, majority-Hispanic workers in Las Vegas and Reno. A Harris supporter, López Rivera canvasses for her union to advocate for the vice president, stressing Harris being the daughter of immigrants.

She speaks Spanish while knocking on doors and says that she encounters some people who tell her, “I love Trump.” Even then, she tries to engage them rather than simply turning away.

“When we focus on the negative, we lose the human side of things,” López Rivera said.

Bipartisan support for stricter border security

Harris’ calls for tightening asylum rules and stepping up enforcement at the border underscore just how much voters backing both parties want a strong hand there.

“Everybody I know, Republican or Democrat, believes border security is important,” said Edgar Flores, a Democratic Nevada state senator and immigration attorney. “We have real problems with drugs, with gangs, with violence.”

But move even partially toward mass deportations, Flores said, and “you’re going to disturb the most essential industries in Nevada, and that’s going to be replicated around the country.”

Marquez, of Make the Road Nevada, said her organization accepts that there need to be stiffer controls at the border, but added, “I think a lot of people — and Trump himself — have this irrational idea that we are here and we are not good people.”

“We are all working class,” said Marquez, who was born in Leon, Mexico, and immigrated at age 3, when her grandmother paid smugglers to take her and her then-pregnant mother into the United States. “All we want is being able to supply food, shelter and a good education for our children and just to be able to grow as a community.”

A recent Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that 86% of Republicans “strongly” or “somewhat support” mass deportations, but so do 25% of Democrats. Overall, 54% of voters support removing potentially millions of people from the country, topping the 42% who oppose it, while a third of Americans see securing the U.S.-Mexico border as the country’s top immigration priority, the survey found.

‘You can’t get anyone to come do the work’

Back on Baker Ranch, the H-2A visa program brings immigrant workers to the fields. They harvest hay, control weeds and irrigate with wheel lines moved by hand, or fully hand irrigate, building small dams using tarps they drag to different areas so that crops can be better submerged in water.

During Trump’s first term, the H-2A program’s participation rose, but he also proposed a rule just before the end of his term that would have frozen farmworkers’ salaries for two years, loosened requirements for worker housing and restricted the transportation costs they could be reimbursed for. The Biden administration wiped those out, but imposed new rules it says can better protect workers and has seen participation climb even higher.

Tom Baker co-owns the ranch with his brothers, and it began operating in 1954, nearly two decades before the area was electrified. He calls it “hard, hot work” that’s “kind of miserable.”

“These kinds of farms, without immigrants, would become infeasible because you can’t get anyone to come do the work,” said Baker, 54. “The wage isn’t the issue. It’s whether people will come do the job.”

The soil — enriched by hot days and nights that turn cooler because of higher elevations — can make for superior hay, some of which goes to race and polo horse centers like West Palm Beach, Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

The ranch has 26 employees, including five current H-2A immigrant workers. Many of the oldest ranch hands arrived long enough ago to get U.S. legal status through 1980s programs. Some have children who were born in the U.S. and are citizens, even if one or both of their parents are not.

The guest workers declined to comment, not wanting to attract undue attention. Still, three generations of immigrant workers at the ranch largely hail from the towns of Apozol and Juchipila in north-central Mexico.

The original arrivals now have grown children. Some of them work at the ranch and have had their own children who are now in high school and work there themselves during the summers. One former employee’s wife had her baby in a ranch vehicle on the way to the hospital, about 80 miles away.

Janille Baker, 51, is no fan of Trump, but also has at times become exasperated with Biden administration regulations. Those include small things like immigrant living quarters being required to have screen doors, despite being air conditioned and already equipped with screens on the windows.

“It is a hot potato and each side’s lobbing one at the other. And, in all honesty, both are to blame,” she said of immigration. “There is going to come a point where it has to get taken care of. You can’t just keep using fearmongering and scaring people, and then being critical of the people who do or don’t want to do whatever jobs.”

___

Associated Press writer Josh Boak in Washington contributed to this report.



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In North Carolina, Trump and Harris navigate a hurricane and a rollercoaster governor’s race

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RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. (AP) — Renee Kyro already has voted for Republican nominee Donald Trump for the third consecutive presidential election. But she plans to volunteer for the first time, reaching out to her neighbors in hurricane-battered western North Carolina to make sure they have a voting plan amid a flurry of precinct changes.

“I want to say I’m confident he wins, but I’m worried that people are just overwhelmed and may need some help or encouragement,” she said, standing outside an early voting site in the conservative stronghold of Rutherford County. “I just can’t imagine Kamala Harris as president.”

To the east, in heavily Democratic Winston-Salem, Dia Roberts described the fear that has her writing postcards urging voters to back Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee.

“Donald Trump is a narcissist, a liar, a wannabe dictator,” said Roberts, an independent who has voted for Democrats in the Trump era. “This should not even be close.”

But it is.

And the presidential race in North Carolina is playing out in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and alongside a governor’s race in which the Trump-endorsed GOP nominee, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, has seen his campaign collapse amid multiple controversies, potentially splintering GOP unity.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are ramping up their activity here again after the storm. Trump has three North Carolina stops Monday, including a visit to see storm damage in Asheville. Former President Bill Clinton appeared last week with Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, and followed with several visits in eastern North Carolina.

With 15 days until Election Day, North Carolina is critical to the Electoral College math that will decide whether Trump gets a White House encore or Harris hands him a second defeat and, in the process, makes history as the first woman, second Black person and first person of south Asian descent to reach the Oval Office.

“We are going to win or lose the presidency based on what happens in North Carolina,” Republican National Chairman Michael Whatley, a North Carolinian, said last week as part of a GOP bus tour.

Pennsylvania and its 20 electoral votes have gotten more attention from Harris and Trump than other battlegrounds. But North Carolina and Georgia are the next largest swing states, with 16 electoral votes each. While Georgia yielded Democrat Joe Biden’s closest victory margin four years ago, it was North Carolina that delivered Trump’s narrowest win: less than 75,000 votes and 1.3 percentage points.

North Carolina is expected to cast as many as 5.5 million ballots, with more than 1 million votes already cast since the start of early voting last Thursday.

Harris on Monday was targeting suburban Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — holding a series of conversations with Republican Liz Cheney that will be moderated by Bulwark publisher and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell and conservative radio host Charlie Sykes.

Hurricane Helene displaced thousands of voters

Many North Carolina counties affected by Hurricane Helene moved Election Day precincts or changed early voting sites. Thousands of voters remained displaced or without power or water as early voting commenced.

Buncombe County, home to left-leaning Asheville, was hard-hit. Appalachian State University in Boone, the other cache of Democratic votes in the mountainous region, remains closed. But surrounding western counties, including Rutherford, add up to more GOP votes than Democrats’ advantages in Asheville and Boone. That leaves both parties scrambling to check turnout operations and their math.

“We’re working every channel we can, you know?” Whatley said. “We’re going to be doing phone calls. We’re going to be doing direct mail. We’ll be doing emails and digital — basically anything we can do to let people know where to go.”

Republicans like Kryo, who lives a short drive from the devastated Chimney Rock community, said she knows “plenty of Trump supporters who lost everything” and others who remain in their homes but don’t have reliable internet or phone connections and may not know their polling location.

“I’ll go door to door if I have to,” she said.

Yet Trump and Republicans never built the same campaign infrastructure as Harris — or President Joe Biden’s before he dropped out of the race in July.

“It was a flip of a coin before the storm,” said GOP pollster Paul Shumaker. “The critical question is going to be: How is the rural turnout going to compare matched with the urban and suburban turnout?” Especially, Shumaker added, if Republicans “continue to have ballot erosion in the urban-suburban areas.”

State Sen. Natalie Murdock, who doubles as political director for Democrats’ coordinated campaign in the state, said the party has the apparatus to reach their target voters in the disaster zone. Field workers in some of Democrats’ two-dozen-plus offices around the state have engaged in recovery efforts, distributing water and other supplies to residents. Murdock noted that Appalachian State is slated to be open before Election Day, with students being able to vote at their usual campus precinct.

Democrats are running both on Helene and Mark Robinson

Even before Helene, North Carolina was all the more compelling because of its history of split-ticket voting. It’s one of the few states that features competitive governor’s races concurrent with presidential contests. Democrats have carried the presidential electoral votes just once since 1992 (Barack Obama’s narrow win in 2008). Republicans have won just one governor’s race in the same span. Four years ago, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper won reelection by 4.5 points despite Trump outpacing Biden. He’s now term-limited.

Democrats hope Robinson’s latest struggles, centered on CNN’s revelations that the state’s first Black lieutenant governor once called himself a “Black Nazi” and posted lascivious statements on a porn website, turn thousands of Cooper-Trump voters into supporters of Harris and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Josh Stein. Robinson has denied the allegations and sued CNN, calling its report defamatory.

In his campaign appearances last week, Walz took care to make two points beyond the usual pitch to any swing-state audience: He offered condolences and promised continued federal assistance to Helene victims, and he declared that Robinson “will never be the governor of North Carolina.”

Said Murdock: “We are definitely making it clear how extreme the Republican ticket is.”

At the least, Trump’s dominance over the GOP has moved some of the state toward Harris, said Robert Brown, a High Point attorney who came to hear Walz. Just 16 years ago, Brown was on the other side of the aisle as Republican nominee John McCain’s state director against Obama.

Trump’s nomination in 2016, Brown said, pushed him to register as an independent and vote for Democrat Hillary Clinton. “Then after Jan. 6, I moved all the way over” and registered as a Democrat, he said.

“I’ve just become more and more scared and disillusioned about the direction of the party and the country,” he explained, adding that he sees Harris as a center-left pragmatist who is as strong on national security as was McCain. “This really isn’t that hard for me and for some other Republicans and former Republicans.”

___

Associated Press writers Thomas Beaumont in Des Moines, Iowa, and Colleen Long in Washington contributed to this report.



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Former Ohio officer to stand trial in 2020 shooting death of Black man

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A white, former Ohio police officer is set to go on trial Monday in the killing of Andre Hill, an unarmed Black man who was shot as he emerged from a garage holding a cellphone nearly four years ago.

Officer Adam Coy, a 17-year veteran of the Columbus police force, fatally shot Hill while responding to a neighbor’s noise complaint. Coy, who was fired after the Dec. 22, 2020, shooting, has pleaded not guilty to murder, reckless homicide and related offenses. Coy’s attorney, Mark Collins, has said the officer thought he saw Hill with a silver revolver in his right hand.

Jury selection in his trial is set to begin Monday.

Coy had gone to the neighborhood to investigate a resident’s complaint about noise from a running car when he encountered Hill.

Police body camera footage showed Hill emerging from the garage of a friend’s house holding up a cellphone in his left hand, his right hand not visible, seconds before he was fatally shot by Coy. About 10 minutes passed before officers at the scene began coming to Hill’s aid, who lay bleeding on the garage floor. He was later pronounced dead at a hospital.

Weeks after the shooting, the mayor forced out the police chief amid a series of high-profile fatal police shootings of Black men and children. Columbus later reached a $10 million settlement with Hill’s family, the largest in city history. Columbus City Council also passed Andre’s Law, which requires police officers to render immediate medical attention to an injured suspect.

Coy had a lengthy history of complaints from residents, with more than three dozen filed against him since he joined the department in 2002, according to his personnel file. A dozen of the complaints were for use of force. All but a few were marked “unfounded” or “not sustained.”

Coy’s legal team tried unsuccessfully to have the case moved out of Columbus, citing heavy publicity. A message was left for Collins, the defense lawyer, ahead of the trial.

Hill, a father and grandfather, was remembered for his devotion to family and as a skilled chef and restaurant manager who dreamed of owning his own eatery.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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Judge will hear arguments to block Louisiana’s Ten Commandments display requirement in schools

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BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A federal judge on Monday will hear arguments on whether he should temporarily block a new Louisiana law requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom by Jan. 1.

The hearing on that and other issues in a pending lawsuit challenging the new law is expected to last all day. It’s unclear when U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles will rule.

Opponents say the law is an unconstitutional violation of separation of church and state and that the display will isolate students, especially those who are not Christian. Proponents argue the measure is not solely religious, but has historical significance to the foundation of U.S. law. Louisiana, a reliably Republican state that is ensconced in the Bible Belt, is the only state with such a requirement.

In June, parents of Louisiana public school children, with various religious backgrounds, filed the lawsuit arguing that the legislation violates First Amendment language forbidding government establishment of religion and guaranteeing religious liberty.

Gov. Jeff Landry, a conservative Republican who has backed the new law, for months has said that he looks forward to defending the mandate in court. When asked during an August press conference what he would say to parents who are upset about the Ten Commandments being displayed in their child’s classroom, he replied: “If those posters are in school and they (parents) find them so vulgar, just tell the child not to look at it.”

Across the country, there have been conservative pushes to incorporate religion into classrooms, from Florida legislation allowing school districts to have volunteer chaplains to counsel students to Oklahoma’s top education official ordering public schools to incorporate the Bible into lessons.

The new law in Louisiana has been touted by conservatives, including former President Donald Trump.

In June, the GOP presidential candidate posted on his social media network: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”

Louisiana’s legislation, which applies to all public school K-12 and state-funded university classrooms, requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed on a poster or framed document at least 11 inches by 14 inches (28 by 36 centimeters) where the text is the central focus and “printed in a large, easily readable font.” Each poster must also be paired with the four-paragraph context statement.

Additionally, tens of thousands of posters will likely be needed to satisfy the new law, considering Louisiana has more than 1,300 public schools Louisiana State University has nearly 1,000 classrooms at the Baton Rouge campus alone.

The mandate does not require school systems to spend public money on the posters, with Republicans saying the displays will be paid for by donations or the posters themselves will be donated by groups or organizations. Questions still linger about how the requirement will be enforced if a teacher refuses to hang up the Ten Commandments and what happens if there are not enough donations to fund the mandate.

In an agreement reached by the court and state last month, five schools specifically listed in the lawsuit will not post the commandments in classrooms before Nov. 15 and won’t make rules governing the law’s implementation before then. The deadline to comply, Jan. 1, 2025, remains in place for schools statewide.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.



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