(George Rasley, CHQ) Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a close race in Michigan; depending upon which poll you like it is either a dead heat or Clinton is slightly ahead, with almost all the polls showing Clinton losing half of what had been a substantial lead over the past few weeks.
If Trump succeeds in Michigan, as the trend indicates he can, it will likely be because of two issues: the failures of Democratic governance and rejection of globalism.
Both issues were on display prominently when Trump visited troubled Flint, Michigan yesterday, which Trump summed up this way in remarks he made there:
“It used to be cars were made in Flint, and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico,” Trump stated. “Now, the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”
Trump visited Flint — a city that has had a water supply crisis since the Spring of 2014 — after the Flint River wasn’t treated with the proper chemicals, which caused an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease that killed 12 people and toxic levels of lead to get into the drinking water.
But – and here’s a Hillary Clinton irony alert – the government officials charged with protecting the public chose to lie about the safety of Flint’s water supply and falsify testing and safety reports.
A total of nine people have been charged in connection with the water crisis. Michael Glasgow, the former utilities administrator, pleaded no contest to neglect of duty as part of the investigation into the water crisis. And on the very day Trump visited the troubled city the former epidemiologist for Michigan acknowledged in a plea deal she was aware of dozens of cases of Legionnaires’ Disease in the Flint area around the time the city changed its water source, but that she did not report it to the general public.
Flint, now a city of 100,000, was once a center of the U.S. automobile industry. Now a shell of its former self, the beleaguered city has steadily shrunk in population and risen in crime as the auto industry has downsized.
And the central reasons for the downsizing were also on display during Donald Trump’s visit to Flint. On the very day Trump visited the state that was once the automobile manufacturing center of the world, Ford Motor Company announced plans to eventually shift all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico.
“Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” Fields said at a daylong investor conference in Dearborn, Michigan.
According to reports in The Detroit Free Press, Fields’ announcement wasn’t much of a surprise. Ford said in April it would invest $1.6 billion to build a new plant in Mexico and create 2,800 jobs so it can build small cars there. Ford also said in 2015 that it planned to move production of its Ford Focus and C-Max hybrids cars from a plant in Wayne, Mich., to another country by 2018.
The industry has known for decades that domestic manufacturers struggle to make a profit on small cars in the U.S. which are mandated by the federal government through what are known as CAFÉ standards.
In addition to the North American Free Trade Agreement, automakers are obviously drawn to Mexico because of its lower wages. The number of auto jobs in Mexico reached 675,000 last year, a 40% increase from 2008 when Barack Obama was elected President.
During his speech in Flint, Trump said Ford should be stopped.
“We shouldn’t allow it to happen,” he said. “They’ll make their cars, they’ll employ thousands and thousands of people not from this country and they’ll sell the cars right through our border. No tax, no nothing, and we’ll have nothing but more unemployment in Flint and in Michigan. It’s horrible.”
Trump argued that sending jobs elsewhere hurts the tax base “that supports our infrastructure, which includes, by the way, our pipes. I met the most beautiful family, and they are devastated by what’s happened with the water.”
Trump’s trip to Flint and his remarks about trade are what got all the press, but there’s another element of globalism that’s also at play in Michigan, and that is “refugee” resettlement and America’s immigration crisis.
Also on the same day that Trump visited Michigan, Michael Leahy of Breitbart News broke the story that the FY 2017 refugee resettlement proposals from the five leading resettlement agencies that operate in Michigan show they plan to jam down a 40 percent increase in refugees from the “Middle East-South Asia” region, which includes Syria, on residents of Michigan in the fiscal year that begins on October 1.
According Leahy’s analysis of the FY 2017 plan submitted by the Samaritas resettlement agency, 100 refugees from the Middle East-South Asia region will be sent to Flint, Michigan, the first time that city in the midst of a huge public health and financial crisis has received refugees.
Trump’s arrival in Flint on Wednesday afternoon, noted Leahy, focused on solutions to the city’s water crisis, and offers a highly political juxtaposition to the Obama administration’s plan to bring refugees into the cash-strapped city.
As Breitbart News reported previously, Michigan is the state with second highest number of resettled Syrian refugees in FY 2016 to date, and the highest per capita rate.
Oakland County, Michigan the affluent suburb of Detroit, population 1.2 million, has been inundated with refugees over the past several years without its consent.
As Breitbart News reported previously, over 486 refugees from Iraq were resettled in Oakland County in FY 2015, and another 408 refugees from Syria (more than forty states) and 329 refugees from Iraq have been resettled in Oakland County in FY 2016 as of September 14, with two more weeks to go in the fiscal year.
The combination of Ford’s announcement it is moving small car production to Mexico, Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” gaffe, concerns over her health and trustworthiness sparked by her diagnosis with pneumonia and collapse leaving a 9-11 memorial event on Sunday, Trump’s aggressive campaigning in Michigan, and the intensity of opposition to the flooding of the state with refugees may mean that Trump has an opportunity to win the normally blue state in November.
The huge influx of unwelcome refugees to Michigan and the strong grassroots opposition to the federally imposed program, is a key factor that now places the state in play concluded Breitbart’s Michael Patrick Leahy and we agree.
George Rasley
