This includes immigration. The Economist noted this fact a week ago:

Interestingly, the American president’s scorn for migrants and globalism has not dampened the global appeal of migrating to America. Gallup, a pollster, has found that given the chance, 158m people would move permanently to the United States—and that the share of would-be migrants who pick the country as their first choice has remained roughly constant since 2010. Moreover, Americans seem to be growing friendlier to foreigners. This year Gallup reported that a record 75% of them think that immigration is good for the country, up from 66% in 2012. On the pollster’s migration acceptance index, which measures how comfortable people are with foreign neighbours or in-laws, America ranks ninth in the world.

Indeed, that is what Gallup’s data shows. When I ever so delicately raised this point on Twitter over the weekend, however, Trump’s defenders got very hot and bothered. Let’s consider their objections, which really boil down to claiming that polling data like Gallup’s is meaningless because it doesn’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. As one of the more cogent responses to my tweet put it: “Donald Trump has never been against immigration, he is against illegal immigration, not merit based immigration, and lax border enforcement. He has proposed his own set of immigration reforms, which are widely supported, but which Democrats refused to pass.”

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There are a few problems with this claim. True, Trump has never said he wants to zero out immigration. He has, however, done a fair number of things that suggests he ain’t thrilled with the current flow of immigrants, either. There was the visa ban he imposed on multiple Muslim-majority countries. There were the disparaging references to immigrants coming from “s**thole countries.”

Beyond the rhetoric, the policy has been equally hostile to legal immigrants. Back in October, Trump floated the idea of issuing an executive order to end birthright citizenship. His administration’s concrete plans to change the immigration system would — well, let me just outsource this to Vox’s Dara Lind: “While the regulation itself is complex . . . the message that immigrants are likely to receive is simple: that they shouldn’t use public benefits if they want to stay in the US. Local service providers (from public assistance clinics to pediatricians) are already seeing this ‘chilling effect’ just based on rumors of the rule and the Trump administration’s generally hawkish tone toward immigrants.”

Trump’s rhetoric on immigration started with disparaging Hispanic immigrants on the day he announced he was running for president, and it has not improved since then. Despite that, the Gallup data show public attitudes toward immigrants have improved during this same period. The same is true if one looks at Pew data.

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But maybe Trump’s supporters are correct. Even if opponents hear Trump bashing immigrants, maybe his supporters just hear him bashing illegal immigrants. And it is also true that when Gallup changed its wording to refer to “legal immigrants,” its results changed: “Americans are more likely to support legal immigration, with 84% describing it as a good thing, nine percentage points higher than the reading for ‘immigration.’” That’s not a huge difference, but it’s a significant difference.

So, if Trump’s supporters are correct, then a silent majority of Americans support a crackdown on illegal immigration and a prioritization on building the wall and deporting these folks, right?

As it turns out, not so much. Here’s Gallup’s Frank Newport:

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Gallup's most recent survey, conducted June 1-13, shows 57% opposed to "significantly expanding the construction of walls along the U.S.-Mexico border" and 41% in favor. In contrast to Americans' majority opposition to building more walls, a proposal to deal with the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program and extend the possibility of citizenship to immigrants covered under this program receives overwhelming support. Eighty-three percent of Americans favor or strongly favor a proposal to allow “immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time,” while 15% oppose or strongly oppose it.

Of course, this was in June, before the caravan, before Trump went on the campaign trail, before the Department of Homeland Security said, “Walls Work,” before Stephen Miller went on Sunday-morning shows to signal the dangers of illegal immigration, and before Americans said immigration was America’s biggest problem. Surely, the public has now lined up behind Trump, right?

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Again, no. CNN’s survey shows no shift in support for Trump on immigration. Its last poll showed 39 percent approve and 54 percent disapprove right now, and it has not changed all that much in the past year. CNN also found that 57 percent oppose building a wall, which is consistent with polling data from the summer. Most intriguingly, Marist found that 50 percent of Americans do not think that funding a wall should be a priority for Congress (only 28 percent thought it should be an immediate priority).

As for Trump prioritizing this issue for the midterms, the Washington Examiner’s David Drucker relays findings from GOP pollster David Winston that Trump’s focus on immigration and the caravan proved to be a colossal mistake. According to Winston, “The focus on the immigration/caravan issue instead of the positive jobs report in the last days of the campaign had a net result of late deciders breaking for Democrats by 12 points.”

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I do not mean to suggest with all of this that the American public has categorically shifted in favor of open borders. That is clearly not the case. What is true is that the polling data on this issue is similar to other elements of liberal internationalism: Republicans are lining up behind Trump, and Democrats and independents are moving as far away from him as possible. And the latter folks outnumber the former folks, which means the country as a whole is shifting away from the Trump administration.

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