As they waited on a sidewalk along the Interstate 35 border road in Austin Wednesday morning, their backs to a ravine and attentive to cars entering and exiting a Home Depot parking lot, the day laborers could get their hands on each other. agreement on certain things.

Work has been slow for some time. And prices – for gas, groceries and rent – ​​are high.

The dozens of men were mostly undocumented immigrants from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador and Haiti. They wore long-sleeved shirts, jeans, sunglasses, and baseball caps necessary for whatever concrete, flooring, plumbing, or carpentry work the day might throw at them.

A pastel blue Chevrolet SUV pulled up in front of them and the men gathered around. The driver offered $40 for five hours of work. Van required.

Some men shrugged, a few others grunted, and most walked away. Two of them wrote down the driver’s phone number.

“Before COVID, we set prices,” said Danilo G., 42, an undocumented immigrant (whose last name is withheld) from Guatemala who has lived in Austin for two decades. “Now they (drivers looking for workers) are installing them.”

Danilo was not eligible to vote in Tuesday’s election, but like several day laborers who spoke to the American Statesman, he was optimistic about the results of the presidential race. A Donald Trump victory, Danilo said, appeared to be the country’s best chance for an economic boom and recovery from the downturn it has felt since the start of the pandemic.

The former Republican president’s return to the White House seemed like Danilo’s best chance to regain a sense of economic stability, which inflation has eaten away – and was worth the potentially increased risk of deportation, he said . This time, or at least on the morning when the election results were still out, a Trump presidency had the whiff of opportunity.

“More investments. If things move, it creates work,” Danilo said in Spanish of what he expected. Furthermore, he said: “Trump wants to deport those who do bad things. …I didn’t break any laws.

Trump has promised to launch the nation’s largest deportation program on his first day back in the White House.

Such trends emerge in some electoral analyses. Pre-election polls by the University of Texas suggested that 61 percent of Hispanic Texans had an unfavorable opinion of the country’s current path. Forty-nine percent of them, a majority, view Trump as a better manager of the nation’s economy than Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee. On election night, an Edison Research exit poll conducted for the Washington Post suggested that Trump won the majority of Latino voters in Texasnearly two-thirds of them Hispanic men, a catastrophic setback against Democrats. If these predictions prove correct, the Hispanic results constitute a historic victory for the Republicans.

Trump performed well in Tuesday’s election among several groups of Hispanic voters who have traditionally voted for Democrats, including small-town working-class Tejanos, Chicanos and Mexican residents of Texas’ border regions and, more broadly, Latino men. For many blue-collar Latino immigrants in Austin, the decision during the presidential election seemed rational: A frustrating economy and a perceived separation between the president-elect’s rhetoric and his future policies had made voting for Trump intriguing. The alternative, for these men, seemed to be a more permanent malaise.

According to Danilo, his preference for Trump has mainly to do with the weakening of his checkbook, although other disagreements with the Democratic message have reinforced his distaste for the Harris ticket. As an evangelical Christian, he was alarmed by what he heard, namely increasing non-binary gender education in schools and emphasis on abortion access.

Finally, a maxim defines his general dissatisfaction with the current establishment. “Those with power have not noticed the difficulties of those without power,” Danilo said as his peers agreed with his statements.

Víctor R., a Mexican immigrant who has lived in Austin and worked as a day laborer for eight years, expressed similar frustrations about the economy. Work, he said, has gone from a near constant level to just two jobs a week in recent years.

“Right now the situation is dire. Right now you earn just enough to survive,” Víctor said in Spanish.

But he’s not convinced about the rosy picture those around him had of Trump’s leadership and the accusations they made against President Joe Biden’s administration.

“The wars have come. The pandemic has arrived. The migrant crisis arrived” when Biden took office, the 61-year-old said in Spanish. Trump “had a piece of cake. …Hopefully something happens under this man to see how he acts. Promising is nothing.

Several men, including Víctor and Danilo, said the shortage of work and growing competition can cause resentment among day laborers. Since Trump was first elected, the number of immigrant men waiting for work in the Home Depot parking lot has increased and become more diverse. Among the primarily Mexican and Central American immigrants now include Venezuelans, Haitians and Cubans. That makes both men open to Trump’s calls to reduce the number of border crossings.

Across the parking lot, Rito Recendez, 82, pushed his orange platform cart with bags of cement and a 15-foot two-by-four that he planned to use to build a storage shed in his backyard. The retired farm worker and hotelier immigrated from the Mexican state of Zacatecas 50 years ago and voted for the first time in 2020 after becoming a naturalized citizen. This time, Recendez chose Biden, a preference that seemed to represent change and normalcy, he explained.

This time around, Recendez planned to vote for Harris, although he changed his mind “about a month” before Election Day after repeated calls from his grandson, who planned to vote for Trump and claimed that the president-elect could improve costs and slow immigration. . Recendez said he thinks too many recent immigrants are using welfare programs, a change from his time.

Trump’s promises, he said, ultimately outweighed his discomfort with Trump’s comments, which he called racist. He started laughing as he listed Trump’s insults.

“We know that’s not true,” Recendez said. “He bothers me a little, but we already know him.”

This story has been updated to identify immigrants living in the United States illegally by their first names only.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Latino men in Texas support Donald Trump, economy was crucial