Why is Trump Losing His Political Edge on Immigration?

History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

Photo by K E on Unsplash

This morning, Gallup released a battery of survey questions related to how Americans feel about immigration. As Gallup’s Lydia Saad writes:

Americans have grown markedly more positive toward immigration over the past year, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today. At the same time, a record-high 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.

These shifts reverse a four-year trend of rising concern about immigration that began in 2021 and reflect changes among all major party groups.

I encourage you to read the full set of survey results here because they all point in one direction: Americans are becoming increasingly warm to immigration, and they are increasingly hostile to some of the enforcement measures that Trump has advocated for, like a border wall and deportation of every single unauthorized immigrant (that position now has the support of just 38% of Americans).

The results are stark but not entirely surprising: they mirror the same political evolution that took place in 2017 and 2018, after President Trump took power during his first term.

This represents a stunning political defeat for Trump that he has now repeated for a second time. He gets elected on a promise of a vast reduction in immigration — illegal immigration, yes, but also broad swaths of legal immigration — and the public gives him a mandate to pursue these policies. Then, shortly after taking office, the public turns on him.

Some people would chalk this up to pure negative polarization. The country is obviously politically divided. And let’s remember that former President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, too, eventually became extremely unpopular.

But I would argue that Trump had an opportunity to establish himself on the middle ground and pursue a path on immigration that would’ve won the support of a commanding majority of the American people. It would have looked something like this:

• More border security and certain restrictions on the asylum process, which was being abused for economic immigration

• Deportations focused on violent offenders and serious criminals, not simple visa overstays or people who have only committed illegal entry but have since followed the law

• Immigration enforcement based on sanctioning employers who engage in illegal hiring and practices

• No deportations based on speech (especially just to protect the feelings of one foreign government and its domestic supporters)

• No blanket bans on entry from entire countries

• No deportations of non-Salvadorans to a notorious Salvadoran prison

• Rhetorical support for legal immigration and legal immigrants and their aspirations

This would’ve positioned Trump squarely in the middle of American public opinion and shown the country that he was listening not just to the far-right — or whoever runs the Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account (they appear to be big fans of white nationalist content).

Instead, it appears that the administration is addicted to shoveling red meat to the far-right corners of its base. At times, their approach to immigration has come across as downright sadistic, as if they are taking pleasure in harming people. Posting an ASMR video of immigrants in shackles is not necessary as part of immigration enforcement.

It’s something you do when your top immigration adviser is someone who reposts an account that does nothing but post videos of black people fighting. It’s pandering to white nationalists and people with racial hangups, not the ordinary person.

There’s a broad consensus in this country that immigration to the United States should be legal and orderly. The chaos seen under President Biden was unacceptable. But Biden’s permissive policies were also put into place after a backlash to Trump’s first terms, which included boneheaded policies like family separation.

If Trump keeps going down the path that he’s on, turning American cities into quasi-military-occupied-zones to snatch people who’ve been working in this country for years and have committed no other crimes than a visa overstay, then all he’s going to succeed in doing in the long run is pushing Americans back to supporting permissive immigration policies.

Abandoning the middle ground and pandering to sadists and white nationalists has consequences, and those consequences are ultimately not good even for nativists themselves.