Donald Trump’s Warning on Election Result Sounds Familiar to Some Immigrants

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/22/us/politics/donald-trump-immigrants.html

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Many voters saw it as a historic breach of tradition when Donald J. Trump refused to say this week that he would accept the result of the election if he lost.

For Maria Julia Echart, who grew up in Argentina, it felt historic in another way.

She said it reminded her of how her native country’s military ousted its democratically elected president in 1976, and how after the ruling junta began to kill activists, her family went into hiding. She remembered sleeping on the floor in a bare apartment with her mother, and being so scared that she once wet her pants.

“I never thought in a million years this country would go through this after coming from Argentina,” said Ms. Echart, 62, who moved to the United States in 1987.

Fairly or not, Mr. Trump’s critics have painted him as being unwelcoming to immigrants, dating back to his calls for mass deportations and for building a wall along the border with Mexico. But his most recent comments about the legitimacy of the election, with their whiff of third-world tumult, have perversely made some immigrants feel right at home.

“When I hear him saying he’s not sure he’s going to respect the results of the election, it makes me think of the period of dictatorship in the Dominican Republic when politicians didn’t respect the will of the people,” said Nieves Padilla, 60, an organizer with Make the Road Action, a New York-based immigrant advocacy group, who came to the United States in 1975.

Few would go so far as to predict mass violence or coups d’état if Mr. Trump lost and refused to concede, given the country’s loyalty to the rule of law.

But it was precisely America’s reputation as a role model for democracy that made the candidate’s comments so jarring for some naturalized citizens. In their minds, they said, questions about a president’s legitimacy were inseparable from chaos and bloodshed, and thus they could not stop themselves from thinking the worst.

“He said, ‘I will concede only if I win?’ My goodness,” said Cristina Drost, 82, a retired teacher in Henderson, Nev. She said she immigrated from the Philippines in 1961 after her uncle, while running for Congress there, was shot by people who did not think he should be in the race. (He survived.) “It is encouraging his supporters who could do some drastic things like killing, especially today since people have guns,” she said of Mr. Trump’s comments.

From his living room in Queens, Francois Pierre-Louis said he could hardly believe that a major-party candidate in the United States was hinting that he might question the will of voters before the results had even been announced.

But Mr. Pierre-Louis, 56, is used to such talk. He grew up in Haiti, which has cycled through dictators and contested elections for decades. Mr. Pierre-Louis said François Duvalier killed all four of his mother’s brothers and many of his male cousins because one of his uncles had openly opposed the dictator and his regime.

“Can you imagine that the United States is going to be a third-world country in the sense that the most prominent candidate of a major party is going to contest the election?” Mr. Pierre-Louis said.

Former President Jimmy Carter, whose organization the Carter Center is known worldwide for election monitoring, has gone so far as to assure people that Mr. Trump’s complaints about the American voting process should not cause worry.

“The Carter Center has observed more than 100 elections around the world, some of them quite problematic,” he said in a statement released by the organization. “However, allegations of potential rigging of U.S. elections, as well as of widespread voter fraud, are baseless, serving only to undermine confidence in our democratic processes and inflame tensions.”

Since the debate, Mr. Trump has both reinforced his remarks — telling a crowd in Ohio that he would accept the results “if I win” — and dialed them back, saying he would “follow and abide by all the rules and traditions.”

And if his words have jarred some foreign-born voters into wondering if they were back in their native countries, others had no problem envisioning where Mr. Trump was coming from.

Alice Backer, 42, a Brooklyn lawyer who grew up in Haiti and has been critical of Hillary Clinton’s actions in Haiti while secretary of state, did not leave her jaded view of elections behind when she came to the United States.

“I think that anyone who does not look at the results of these elections with some skepticism is probably not exercising critical thinking,” said Ms. Backer, who plans to vote for the Green Party nominee, Jill Stein. “If indeed Trump finds that there is evidence that the results of the coming election will be fraudulent, I’m not going to be particularly surprised.”