A combination of changing demographics powered by rapid population growth and an uneasiness with President Trump’s brand of right-wing nationalism helped flip suburban areas of Arizona like Maricopa County — once policed and represented by anti-immigrant leaders Sheriff Joe Arpaio and state state Sen. Russell Pearce — from red to blue. “The trends in Maricopa are being replicated in suburbs across the country, particularly in fast-growing, traditionally Republican metro areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Houston,” writes Joshua Green in an analysis for Bloomberg Businessweek. The changes will give suburbs across the country outsized importance this fall: “They’re really a microcosm of America,” author and demographer William Frey says: “They have rich and poor; Black, White, and Latino; and as they change, their voting patterns change, too. As a group, suburbs have become much more racially diverse, much more like the rest of America.”

Welcome to Wednesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. As I mentioned yesterday, we’ll be paying special attention over the next few weeks to how immigration is impacting the election, particularly in swing states. If you have a story to share from your own community, please share with me at [email protected].

FORGOTTEN – Hundreds of asylum seekers are still stuck waiting in the migrant tent camps of Matamoros, Mexico — just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, Dianne Solis reports for the Dallas Morning News. Bodies have turned up in the river as migrants continue to face poor health conditions and threats of violence and kidnapping. “They have been here for over a year, and they are desperate,” said Sister Norma Pimentel, who runs Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley and regularly visits the Matamoros camp. “We were a country that represents to the world the best values and we’re failing these people, totally, 100 percent.” The truth is that as COVID-19 has further exacerbated wait times for asylum seekers after the litany of immigration restrictions handed down by the Trump administration, we have forgotten about the thousands stuck in these camps.

BIG APPLE DISPATCH – The effects of the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies are felt sharply in the Big Apple as immigration to the city plummets, reports Kate King for The Wall Street Journal. “Immigration to New York City dropped 45% between 2016 and 2019,” King notes, with pandemic-related restrictions and delays making it even more difficult in a city where “[i]mmigrants make up about 45% of the local workforce and own more than half of the city’s businesses.” Officials are increasingly worried about the long-term impact of the decline in a city that has historically been home to millions of immigrants: “I am worried that declining rates of international immigration will hurt not only future economic growth in New York City but the stability of New York City’s tax base,” said Michael Hendrix, director of state and local policy at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute.

“GROSS HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS” – For The New York Review of Books, Joe Penney tells the story of Wilfred Tebah and other African immigrants who are using hunger strikes to protest the poor treatment they’ve experienced at the Pine Prairie immigrant detention center in Louisiana. Tebah and other asylum seekers are protesting their prolonged detainments at the facility (11 months compared to the average stay of 45 days) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s “failure to acknowledge their parole and bond applications, abysmal medical conditions, including a lack of Covid-19 precautions (even though several detainees are immuno-compromised), their being served food stuffs that have passed their expiration dates.”

“MULTIPLE AND SYSTEMATIC” – An inspection following a COVID-19 outbreak at an ICE detention center in Farmville, Virginia, that left one inmate dead concluded that high-risk detainees should be released, Matthew Barakat reports in the Associated Press. Citing “multiple and systematic deficiencies,” the investigation found that the facility did not adequately monitor symptoms among those in custody. In his report, inspector Homer Venters “wrote that detainees who reported being sick often went several days before they were seen by medical staff, despite assurances by the center that all detainees are seen within 24 hours of making a sick call.”

“UPHILL BATTLE” – Immigrant food entrepreneurs are facing an “uphill battle” amid the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Brendan Seibel for Civil Eats. “Anybody who doesn’t have a lot of savings isn’t going to be able to invest in the business in the way that it’s going to need to [adapt],” said Leticia Landa, deputy director of La Cocina, a food incubator that has spent the past 15 years helping low-income women and immigrants launch their culinary food businesses. Earlier this year I spoke with Nafy Flatley, a Senegal-born chef and entrepreneur with backing from La Cocina, about immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. food and restaurant scene for “Only in America.” (FYI — if you’re in DC, my favorite immigrant startup restaurant these days is Muchas Gracias DC.)

Thanks for reading,

Ali