Border Wall Is Out of Sync With the Southwest's Changing Politics

By Trip Gabriel
Jan. 25, 2019

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LAS CRUCES, N.M. ... Xochitl Torres Small, a 34-year-old water rights lawyer, won by carefully calibrating her message as a problem-solver, like several other moderate Democrats who flipped House seats nationwide last year. Though the region is 55 percent Hispanic, she did not harp on President Trump’s border wall or his incitement of fears of immigrants bringing crime and drugs ...

“In New Mexico, we experience the positions of this president a little more intimately than a lot of people,” said Jeff Steinborn, a Democratic state lawmaker from Las Cruces. “The race baiting, divisive border politics has a very human face in our community” ...

In addition to Ms. Torres Small’s district, Democrats flipped a House seat in the midterms on the southern border in Arizona and four seats in rapidly diversifying Orange County in Southern California ...

“The irony of the wall is it works best the further you are from the border,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, the state with the highest share of Hispanics ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/us/politics/border-wall-democrats-trump.html