Nathan Howard/AP Photo
Protesters chant during a demonstration against President Trump’s use of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, prison for people deported from the U.S. for entering the country illegally, outside the Embassy of El Salvador in Washington, April 14, 2025.
The Gallup poll on whether Americans think immigration should be increased or decreased shows a curious pattern. From about 2001 at a high of 65 percent, there was a steady decline in the fraction of respondents who favored less immigration, with a corresponding upward trend in the fraction favoring more. The lines briefly crossed in mid-2020, with a plurality in favor of increased immigration—but starting in 2021, there was a sudden jump back toward restriction.
During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump consistently received his highest approval ratings on immigration. The fraction of people saying that immigration is the most important issue in the country jumped from 9.2 percent in 2021 to 14.6 percent in 2024. And Trump’s xenophobic stance seemingly paid off even among Latinos who would be targets of his mass deportation agenda—he was the first Republican to win the Rio Grande Valley, which is chock-full of mixed-status families, since 1912. Post-election reporting saw many anecdotes of unauthorized immigrants themselves saying they would have voted for Trump, because surely he wouldn’t deport hardworking people like themselves.
But now, that support is fading fast. More recent polls show the priority of immigration plummeting, and majority disapproval for Trump on the issue. In the most recent YouGov/Economist poll, he is now 11 points underwater, down 16 points since he was inaugurated. Among Latinos, he is now 46 points underwater.
I think it is reasonably clear what is going on here. Republicans have a highly effective propaganda apparatus that, with the decline of mainstream journalism and the rise of social media, is more effective than ever. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, conservatives successfully whipped up a xenophobic anti-immigrant frenzy with a torrent of outrageous lies, against a background of perceived crisis at the border. But as soon as Trump takes power and makes actual decisions rather than just spreading misinformation, the public gets a whiff of what Republican anti-immigrant policy looks like in practice, and they don’t like it. It turns out that few people thought they were voting for the president to kidnap a legal resident by mistake, deport him to a torture prison in a foreign country, and openly defy a Supreme Court order to bring him back.
Until someone, be it progressives or centrists, can build a media apparatus to counter right-wing agitprop and make a case for humane immigration policy, this cycle is likely going to repeat.
Trump’s totalitarian assault on the civil rights of immigrants is awful, but also an opportunity.
Presidents Obama and Biden attempted to address immigration through policy appeasement. Obama escalated deportations, eventually reaching a rate about twice that of George W. Bush’s first term. The idea was that if congressional Republicans were bought off, they would agree to legal reform of the immigration system, which was (and is) a badly understaffed, Kafkaesque nightmare. It did not work; a reform bill was blocked by House Republicans despite passing the Senate, and Obama backed off and set up DACA protections for people who had immigrated as children.
Biden, as my colleague Paul Starr writes, had a more balanced approach. He faced a large increase in asylum seekers thanks to pent-up migration from the pandemic, as well as climate change and economic collapse in Venezuela. He tightened up border security and also deported a lot of people, but he also expanded and streamlined the asylum system, roughly tripling the number of asylum grants.
But as Starr demonstrates, neither Biden, nor Obama, nor Kamala Harris, nor anyone else capable of reaching a mass public has consistently made the case for immigration. Instead, seeing how Republicans have made electoral hay out of the issue—particularly with Trump’s inroads among border-state Latinos—Democrats largely gave up and accepted the restrictionist frame. This likely only helped Trump, as if voters are convinced that immigration is some huge crisis, they’ll tend to opt for full-strength xenophobia rather than a diet version.
Trump’s totalitarian assault on the civil rights of immigrants is awful, but also an opportunity. He is now publicly mulling the possibility of zero-due-process deportations of American citizens to El Salvador’s torture prison. That is where Republican anti-immigrant xenophobia cashes out: first with legal immigrants being black-bagged on the street for writing an op-ed some racist didn’t like, and eventually citizen opponents of the regime being sent to the gulag.
It’s also an opportunity to educate people about the realities of our immigration system. In my experience, most native-born people have no clue what a complicated, expensive, nonsensical, and above all slow process it is. It still takes years (if not decades), thousands of dollars, a gigantic pile of paperwork, and a lot of luck for regular people who do it all right. (Rich people, naturally, get to just buy their way in.)
The truth is that there is no serious immigration crisis in terms of America’s ability to absorb new people—a few million a year in a country of 340 million is just not a big deal. Economic studies show large benefits from historical immigration; with declining birth rates, we would be even more advised to allow a plentiful supply of new workers. Besides, most Americans are themselves descended from relatively recent immigrants; unlike most of Europe, America has long experience in absorbing people from other cultures. That’s what was happening in Springfield, Ohio, with a bunch of Haitian refugees before Chris Rufo and JD Vance started spreading racist, knowingly false blood libels about them.
Republicans are able to create a perception of a crisis in part because the legal process is so clogged up that applicants’ cases can’t be adjudicated quickly, and so people pile up at border checkpoints or decide to try their luck and sneak across.
At any rate, Democrats have long been addicted to chasing polls. The idea, heard today among the “popularist” crowd, is that messaging should be constantly tweaked and tuned to fit whatever happens to be polling well that day. More successful parties, like the Republicans, understand that they have a substantial ability to affect what polls say through their own messaging. Trump did not give up on his xenophobic project in 2020 when opinion was dead against him; he just kept pushing his message, and eventually the public followed. Democratic electeds, funders, and activists ought to be making the case for immigration everywhere they can.
Furthermore, what Republicans don’t understand—or simply ignore—is that policy affects polls too. Trump built up public support for mass deportation, but when it came time to actually do it, that support crumbled. It follows that if Democrats were to win power and ram through comprehensive immigration reform even if it polls poorly, much of the energy would drain out of the issue. Sometimes the Band-Aid is best ripped off.
