OPINION

Trump managed to make immigration a voting issue and a defining difference between Republicans and Democrats. But it hasn't worked out as planned.

Stanley B. Greenberg | Opinion contributor

Donald Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015, lamented that Mexico sends us its worst, murderers and rapists. His convention speech featured mothers whose loved ones were murdered by illegal immigrants, and he attacked Hillary Clinton for supporting open borders. Later, according to a new book, he proposed moats, alligators, flesh-piercing spikes and shooting immigrants in the legs as they crossed the border.

He succeeded in raising the importance of immigration as a voting issue and defining difference between the parties. But it hasn’t worked out as planned. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Some swing white working-class voters shifted to Trump on immigration in 2016, yet the proportion of voters who wanted to create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants went up overall. Then, as president, Trump tried to implement a Muslim travel ban and repeatedly sought to get funding for a border wall to protect from the Central American caravans. How did America respond?

Immigration a 2018 loser for Trump

Pew asked whether immigrants “strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents” or “are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” The proportion embracing immigration jumped from 53% in 2015 to 62% this year.

Trump sent troops to the border, warned of an America exposed without a wall and ran ads showing illegal immigrants who murdered innocent Americans, and yes, he made immigration the most important reason to vote against the Democrats in the off-year elections. His party lost the House in a 53%-45% landslide last year and has lost the battle of public opinion on immigration by much more than that.

Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

In 2019, Trump escalated his battle against immigration by separating children from their parents, creating camps for the pent-up migrants in the United States and Mexico, and ending America’s historic identity as a country that will accept refugees.

What happened? In one of the most stunning results in our surveys, the proportion responding warmly to the term “immigrants to the U.S.” went up from 52% in January 2019, to 59% in July, to 67% in September. 67%.

Fateful political party choices

The two political parties have been defined in the past half-century by the choices they made at critical junctures when America lifted restrictions on blacks, women and immigrants. Most important, it fought the GOP establishment and bipartisan immigration reforms backed by President Ronald Reagan and Sen. Edward Kennedy that made America increasingly and irreversibly immigrant, foreign-born and multicultural.

Republicans Reagan and President George H.W. Bush supported and signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and the Immigration Act of 1990. The former granted legalization to millions who came to America illegally and the latter prioritized family reunification and employment-based immigration and expanded visas for those with extraordinary abilities.

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These laws promised to change the face of America, and they produced an immediate backlash. The number of Americans who thought immigration should be reduced jumped from half before the immigration reform laws to two-thirds in 1994. Pat Buchanan rode that wave in the Republican primaries in 1992 and 1996 and pioneered an economic nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, America First vision that Donald Trump would ride to the presidency.

California Gov. Pete Wilson led the GOP immigrant efforts in the states with the 1994 passage of Proposition 187 that barred illegal immigrants from using the public schools and health services and required cooperation with federal law enforcement agencies. Federal courts never allowed it to come into force, but it was the model for Republican governors after the 1994 Republican wave and the 2010 Tea Party wave.

New America pushes back

In 2018, when House leaders were forced to hold a vote on immigration, a majority of House Republicans voted to reduce legal immigration. They knew their party was still animated by the Tea Party revolt against President Barack Obama, whose election and reelection represented the rise of a racially diverse, young and metropolitan new America.

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But the escalating GOP battle against immigration produced the first evidence of the pushback by the New America. A Gallup Poll in June 2012 showed the proportion wanting the level of immigration to decrease dropped to 35%, nearly the lowest level ever, and that is where it is now.

From the Tea Party revolt against Obama to Trump’s Tea Party-driven GOP, an ugly battle to stop immigration is forcing people to think through what they believe. A huge proportion of the country now embraces America as an immigrant country with a multicultural identity. That America won’t have much use for a Republican Party that is ferociously anti-immigrant.

Stanley B. Greenberg, a founding partner of Greenberg Research and Democracy Corps, is the author of “R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America is Dooming the Republican Party.” Follow him on Twitter: @StanGreenberg

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