Public opinion shifts on immigration again

Yet another example of how contemporary presidents have more ability to create backlash than to shift public opinion in their direction:

Americans’ views of immigration have swung drastically upward in the past year, with a new poll showing record-high support for immigration amid President Donald Trump’s controversial mass deportation campaign.

A record 79 percent of American adults think immigration is good for the country, according to a new Gallup poll released Friday. And the number of Americans who want immigration reduced dropped sharply from 55 to 30 percent since last year’s poll.

Meanwhile, disapproval of Trump’s immigration approach outweighs approval by 27 percent, potentially complicating the president’s strategy on a policy area that he has made a cornerstone of his presidential agenda.

Trump campaigned for president on a strongly anti-immigration platform, vowing to enact mass deportations and playing into rising fears and frustrations about growing immigration trends under the Biden administration. In July 2024, the number of Americans who said they wanted to curb immigration had spiked to 55 percent in the Gallup survey — the first time since 2009 that the majority of Americans have sought to decrease immigration.

Upon entering office, Trump enacted sweeping anti-immigration policies, including launching significant immigration detention and deportation efforts that have landed his administration in legal hot water several times.

But as Trump’s crackdown has intensified, Americans’ negative views on immigration have reversed.

According to Gallup, the record-high approval of immigration is largely due to an upswing in Republicans’ views — 64 percent of Republicans said immigration was beneficial to the country, jumping from 39 percent last year.

Support for immigration has remained consistently high among Democrats, with 91 percent saying immigration is positive, while independents ticked up from 66 percent in 2024 to 80 percent this year.

The sharp change in Americans’ perception of immigration suggests that the fears on which Trump focused his campaign have diminished. And as worries about immigration subside, so does support for harsh measures to stop or reverse it.

Some analysis of immigration policy is confused because it treats “immigration” as a singular issue rather than multiple issues with different political valences. The fact that a more secure border is popular doesn’t mean that having masked goons arresting construction workers at the Home Depot is popular. On Election Day 2024 Trump benefitted greatly from marginal voters projecting their own immigration policy preferences onto Trump, but you lose the ability to benefit from that ambiguity when you’re actually president and doing a lot of high-profile actions that look bad to people who aren’t hardcore MAGA voters.