Sunday, September 25, 2016

These Muslim refugees just might influence election results

If Hillary Clinton's poll numbers don't rise in the next 10 days, I'll probably have to throw at you all the "it CAN happen here" material I find myself collecting.

But in the meantime, here's a story from one of those obscure niches of our society that are what makes this an interesting country:

Missouri, after swinging right of late (filling the state legislature with Republicans and voting for McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012) is showing some signs of reverting to its historical status as a swing state, suspended somewhere between North and South, between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats seem to have a chance of replacing one Democratic governor with another and even unseating an incumbent Republican U.S. Senator with an attractive newcomer, Jason Kander, if all goes well.

If this happens, Muslim refugees, now U.S. citizens, will have a role to play. As passed along by Raw Story from Global Post, Missouri has a growing community of Bosniaks who were chase out of their homes by Serb ethnic cleansing during the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia.
Today that community has grown to an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 people — primarily Bosniaks, one of the largest such communities in the world outside the Balkans — and in recent years has emerged as a recognizable voting bloc in local politics. Heading into November’s presidential election, St. Louis’ Bosniak and Kosovar communities are near-universally turned off by Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim refugee rhetoric and are skeptical of the candidate’s popularity among Serbian nationalists.

... 10,000 Bosnian names [appear] in St. Louis-area voter lists. With some recent polls showing Clinton and Trump at a virtual tie in Missouri, 10,000 votes could become critical. ... the first generation of children born to Bosnian refugees resettled in St. Louis have reached voting age and eight years worth of Bosnian immigrants have become naturalized citizens. For many Bosnian and Kosovar voters in St. Louis, particularly those who survived Yugoslavia’s bloody breakup, Trump’s anti-Muslim, anti-refugee rhetoric raises red flags.

In August, indicted war criminal Vojislav Seselj of the Serbian Radical Party led a march through Belgrade encouraging Serbian Americans to vote for Donald Trump. He gave the Republican candidate’s “support” of Russia as a reason for his endorsement.
Trump fan at the Republican National Convention
Immigration makes us who we are.

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