The immigration 'vibe shift'—11-19-24

Immigration news, in context.

As the Trump administration and a new GOP two-chamber congressional majority takes shape and starts heading towards a clearer and more functional immigration agenda, we’ll be writing much about its nuts and bolts. To better understand all that, though, we felt it would be useful to delve a little more into the context of public and political sentiment around immigration, and how it appears to have shifted significantly in the last few years, in what we’re terming, very scientifically, a “vibe shift.”

A little less than four years ago, we were cautiously optimistic. In his effort to oust Trump, Joe Biden put forth a far more inclusive immigration platform than any candidate in modern history: he not only promised to undo lethal policies like Remain in Mexico, but also said he’d implement a 100-day pause on deportations and work with Congress to rebuild our asylum and refugee systems. It didn’t take long for our optimism to give way to disappointment. Stymied by federal courts — and Trump-appointed judges — Biden was prohibited from implementing some of his boldest policies. Congress never passed an immigration bill. And Republicans immediately began hectoring Biden about the supposed chaos and lawlessness at the border — chaos and lawlessness that existed, to be sure, but did not suddenly materialize on January 21, 2021.

In the months and years since, the national sentiment on migrants has shifted considerably. Staunch Democrats have walked back their “no human being is illegal” stance, one that we long suspected was more about opposition to Trump than a commitment to this principle. On the campaign trail, Kamala Harris pitched herself as a champion of “strong border security” who was committed to getting things done, blaming Trump (rightly, we might add) for killing the “toughest” border bill in decades. Voters either didn’t buy it or didn’t care. Pundits are still debating why, exactly Trump won — whether it was the economy, the border, a lack of liberal podcast bros, or something else altogether — but one thing that is eminently clear is that, this time around, Trump’s cruelty toward immigrants didn’t hurt him. If anything, voters like it.

Compare this to where we were four years ago. In 2020, most Americans — 77 percent, according to one Pew poll — believed undocumented immigrants do jobs Americans don’t want. Around three-quarters of US adults favored a path to citizenship for undocumented people who were brought to the US as children, commonly referred to as Dreamers. Nearly 70 percent of voters said immigrants are good for the country, and 34 percent thought immigration to the US should increase, while 36 percent thought it should stay at the current level. Those trends have, for the most part, reversed: a July poll found that 55 percent of adults want to see immigration decrease. Nearly 100 percent of Trump supporters say they support “immigration border security,” as did 85 percent of Harris voters, according to a September poll. 

Obviously a lot has changed since 2020, when Trump used Title 42, a public health statute, to effectively shut down asylum at the border. When Biden took office, he was on a sort of Title 42 tightrope: he kept it in place while granting humanitarian exemptions to some migrants. The border remained “closed” to asylum seekers but was simultaneously more porous than it had been a year prior — not because the Biden administration had “lost control,” as Republicans claimed the second Biden took office, but because it had, albeit slowly and seemingly haphazardly, started restoring asylum seekers’ right to seek protection in the US. There were also factors that had little to do with border policy, including the waning threat of the pandemic, which had collapsed international migration in general. This haphazard approach to border management sent a contradictory message to the public, one that Republicans seized upon with glee. 

Texas governor Greg Abbott took advantage of the situation at the border, bussing migrants to blue cities across the country to, in his words, make Democrats deal with the consequences of their own actions. Cities like New York became hubs for asylum seekers who, unable to work, often arrived with no resources and no prospects. The result was undeniably visceral: busloads of people arriving by the day in New York, encampments of homeless migrants in Chicago, a flow of people with seemingly no end in sight. A parallel cost of living crisis made these folks easy scapegoats for nativists to seize on, telling the public that their tax dollars were being used to support recently arrived migrants while Americans went hungry.

The narrative shifted to the idea that the public suddenly seemed open to mass deportations. When you look past the headlines, though, you realize that’s not the whole truth. Polling suggests that most people would prefer a path to citizenship for “undocumented immigrants who have been living in the US for some years and have not committed a serious crime.”

One thing that’s important to grasp about the electoral approach to immigration is that for a big chunk of voters it’s probably not really about immigration as a practice itself. Yes, there’s certainly a contingent of great-replacement obsessives and people who are at base worried about a less white country or one with proliferating cultures that they see as ultimately threatening to a desired bright-line racial and ethnic hierarchy.

But when a good chunk of average voters hear about immigration, what they’re really thinking about are the various other issues in their spectrum of political preferences — the cost of eggs and housing, the sense of rising crime (which is ever-present regardless of whether violent crime actually is rising or falling), manufactured concerns about Democrats trying to steal the election, and so on. There is an expansive communications apparatus that has gone all-in on portraying immigrants as responsible for issues real and fake, to the point that voters—who have by and large not interacted with asylum seekers or had any impact to their lives from the so-called migrant crisis—can lay at their feet all manner of other issues.

This is not either-or, of course. The reason a lot of people buy this is because they’re predisposed to due to existing racism and overall prejudice. When some voters grumbled about migrants getting supposed benefits as their own grocery bills went up (or, as the conspiracy theory went, sucking FEMA dry before it could respond to hurricane damage) they were not generally envisioning the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees that have entered in the past couple years. They were probably thinking of Latin American or African arrivals, with the various assumptions that would entail.

Now, that doesn’t quite explain why these attitudes seem to range across demographics — why Black and Latino voters also seemed susceptible to this message. That’s too complicated of an issue to try to briefly summarize here, and we certainly hope we don’t have to tell you the extent to which racism and prejudice is entirely possible within these communities as well, but let’s tackle one specific dimension of this, what we’ll call the “doesn’t mean me” phenomenon. Obviously, anyone who’s a voter and therefore a citizen is already in a different place than the immigrants Trump seems to be targeting. But it goes beyond that; voters who have friends and relatives at potential risk, as well as immigrant non-citizens themselves, routinely seem to believe, against all available evidence, that both the rhetoric and practice of heavy-handed immigration enforcement doesn’t apply to them.

In one representative example, the New York City-focused outlet THE CITY went to several city neighborhoods that had most swung towards Trump and interviewed people, including a 23-year-old undocumented butcher from Mexico named Javier Flores. “I couldn’t vote but if I could, I would choose him,” he told a reporter, in Spanish. “They should remove everyone who isn’t supposed to be here — the bad people.” It goes without saying that, per every single definition of “bad people” that Trump and his upper-echelon officials have delineated, that Flores would not be spared.

In fact, as we will get into as we write more thoroughly about the specifics of the incoming administration’s immigration plans, Trump will also certainly scrap the current ICE prioritization scheme, just as he did the first time he got into office. Early in Biden’s term, he reinstituted a very similar framework, which in practice meant that people like Flores — longer-term residents without criminal justice contact — were not generally targeted. If Trump changes the rules again, this will mean that ICE will not leave people like Flores alone, and in fact is likely to go aggressively after these so-called lower-hanging fruit, who the agency is often already aware of and who it can easily locate to bump up detention and deportation numbers. Put another way, just about the exact opposite of what Flores expressed is true.

Yet, as other observers have noted, one upshot of Trump’s slipperiness and constant lying is that he gets to be something of an empty vessel for voters — they believe what they want to believe about him, and whatever they don’t like is probably just something he’s bluffing about or doesn’t mean. This is how you get the friends and family of immigrants, as well as immigrants themselves, discounting the possibility that they’ll be targeted; it’s a bit glib to just chalk it up to “I never thought the leopards would eat MY face” but there’s certainly an element of that, fed by the same propaganda machine that’s portrayed the “bad” immigrants as fundamentally other — those people who aren’t like you.

As we documented extensively throughout, the Trump administration was both very effective at finding purely executive ways to crack down on immigration, and often rather incompetent at doing so in a way that could both pass legal muster and was effectively executed. Policies like the public charge rule, the stripping of DACA and TPS, and true nationwide mass deportations never really came to fruition because of legal and operational hurdles.

Now, the judiciary has shifted dramatically in a direction friendly to Trump and committed zealots like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan have had years to plan Trump’s second term. A lot of people are likely going to be surprised by how aggressive the immigration enforcement is this time around because they both did not see the total contours of the efforts—including failed efforts—last time around, and it’s been just long enough that they’ve forgotten the worst of it.

To get even a touch more esoteric, there’s probably something to be said about the broader trend of fraying social bonds, supercharged by the Covid pandemic. As multiple studies have begun noting, and as commentators now consistently fret about, people are spending less and less time in social situations, have fewer friends, feel less connected to communities, and engage in more antisocial behavior. Plenty of research shows that prejudice declines as direct contact increases, even during periods of conflict, so there’s a natural question here about whether the collapse of a sense of community and physical interactions with others has helped harden some voters against immigrants.

It’s entirely possible, and we would say even relatively likely, that when the hammer really comes down from a better-prepared and aggressive administration—now considering the use of the military, though we’re not convinced that this is likely to actually happen—the pendulum swings back. The grim economic and social realities of a mass deportation effort will be more difficult, though not impossible, to effectively spin in the right wing’s communications apparatus. Mass deportations at the scale Miller and his allies are envisioning is not certain, and will depend to a large extent on public buy-in: do local officials cooperate? Do individuals in areas with larger immigrant populations? How much does business balk? All this will help determine how the next few years actually play out.