Former President Bill Clinton claimed Tuesday that areas in America that tend to be most anti-immigrant also have small populations of undocumented workers.
“All of us are from immigrant families at one time or another — unless you’re a Native American and all your ancestors are,” the former president told supporter during a campaign stop in Toledo, Ohio. “The only immigrants they replaced were the dinosaurs.”
“It’s very interesting that most of the anti-immigrant sentiment in America is concentrated in areas where people are having a hard time making a living and there aren’t many immigrants,” he said. “And I get that. We all want to blame somebody if there’s a problem.”
Though it’s difficult to determine the exact location of pro- and anti-immigration sentiment in America, there are studies tracking which states offer undocumented workers the best access to educational, health and other benefits. And in some cases, states that have the largest illegal immigrant populations are among the least inclusive to those immigrants.
For example states with the largest populations of illegal immigrants are California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Virginia, according to data compiled by Inside Gov and the Migration Policy Institute.
But Arizona, Virginia and North Carolina also ranked among the 10 states that are least inclusive to illegal immigrants, according to the UCLA study.
The top 10 most inclusive states for illegal immigrants are California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Connecticut, according to a study released in 2015 by UCLA’s Blum Center on Poverty and Health in Latin America.
The study ranked all 50 states based on nine factors, including labor and unemployment, access to public health and welfare, higher education, access to driver licensing and government ID card programs and enforcement of the federal Secure Communities program.
The 10 states that are the least inclusive towards illegal immigrants are Ohio, West Virginia, Mississippi, Indiana, Arizona, Alabama, Wyoming, Virginia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, according to the same UCLA study.
