Will Immigration Bedevil Trump II?
Public opinion is shifting in Trump’s direction, and his team has learned lessons from last time.
A poll in April 2024 showed a surprising 51 percent of Americans expressing support for mass deportations, including 42 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Republicans. Three months later, another shocking poll showed a 14-point jump from the previous year in the share of Americans saying immigration should be lower, 55 percent today compared to 41 percent last year.
These numbers caught the attention of headline writers, because Donald Trump has promised that if reelected he will launch the “largest deportation effort in American history.” “On Day One of my new administration, I will seal the border, stop the invasion of people pouring through our border, and send Joe Biden’s illegal aliens back home where they belong,” he has promised.
Most observers had previously assumed that mass deportations were like the big, beautiful wall promised in the 2016 campaign: colorful rhetoric with little chance of actually being enacted beyond token efforts. The backstop against deportation, they figured, if somehow the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles were surmounted, was public opinion. Voters would not support it. The American public is consistently schizophrenic on immigration, saying on the one hand that illegal immigration should be stopped and on the other hand that no individual illegal immigrant should be penalized unless he is also a violent criminal.
If polls continue to show majority support for measures that had previously been considered drastic, such as deportation, that will be a wake-up call for complacent immigration proponents who expect a Trump II term to be hamstrung as effectively as was Trump I.
In every country of the developed world, from North America to Europe, the immigration issue is a race against demographics: Will the legacy majority of the country take the steps necessary to curb mass migration before demographic change wipes out their political power to do so? It is a rapidly closing pincer. In the United States, foreign-born citizens already constitute a large enough share of the population in swing states such as Georgia and Michigan to provide the margin of victory in elections, so the political impact of mass migration could become decisive well before the country officially becomes majority-minority, currently projected to occur circa 2045.
Public opinion on immigration matters in the U.S. in a way that it does not in Europe. Over there, popular discontent with high levels immigration is very difficult to translate into any real policy change. In countries that belong to the European Union, its supranational bureaucracy overrides domestic majorities on issues such as refugee resettlement. Brussels does not hesitate to use all the leverage at its disposal to bring holdouts to heel, as it did in the recent election in Poland, where the EU tipped the scales by making clear that the restrictionist party would be punished and the more open-borders party (which ultimately prevailed) would be rewarded.
In the United Kingdom, voters have consistently voiced a desire for less immigration, and the permanent bureaucracy has simply ignored them. When the British public has managed to make its wishes unignorable, as in the Brexit referendum, this has only made the pro-migration elite more determined than ever to inflict greater numbers of migrants on the country as a punishment, to demonstrate to other nations that might be inclined to follow Brexit’s rebellious example that dissent from the migration regime will not be allowed.
The difference between those countries and the U.S. is, most importantly, that their right-wing parties are captured. The British voters gave the Tories huge majorities, and it didn’t matter, because the Tories, in practice, were just as pro-migrant as Labour. The same dynamic is seen in Canada, where Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre projects an appealing image as a straight shooter but has so far mostly sidestepped the immigration issue and is unlikely to alter the country’s demographic transformation if elected.
The U.S. is not like that, at least not anymore. In the past, the Republican party was like the Tories, willing to talk tough on immigration to appease its base but, behind closed doors, more interested in juicing GDP numbers and keeping wages low for employers. The poll mentioned earlier that showed 55 percent support for lower immigration hit its record high, 65 percent, in 1993 and 1995. Those record highs did not lead to a reduction in the number of immigrants coming to the country; quite the opposite. The party that should have given concrete expression to that democratic majority opinion failed to do so.
Trump changed all that. Having a genuine immigration hawk on the Republican ticket altered the dynamic of domestic politics on the issue. No longer was the fighting just for show. A Republican administration might take real action to curb illegal immigration and send back those already here.
This is why President Joe Biden’s administration has taken steps to limit the chaos at the border in the months leading up to the presidential election. No buses have left from Texas for northern cities since June, after transporting no fewer than 119,000 illegal migrants from the border to the interior since April 2022. The number of border crossings in July was less than half the number recorded the same month last year. Obviously this is just for show, and numbers will soon be back up to record highs if Kamala Harris is elected, but at least the White House feels the need to suppress a public relations disaster, a worry that would not even occur to the more insulated bureaucrats of Europe.
It is a double-edged sword, because public relations can hamper restrictionists, too. Several of Trump’s programs had to be abandoned when public outcry against them reached a fever pitch, such as the family separation policy that removed minors detained at the border from their guardians.
So that is the situation facing a potential second Trump administration. Public opinion is more favorable to Trump’s immigration agenda than ever before, and that support matters more in the U.S. than in other countries where restrictionists have tried to achieve their policy goals, but the same forces that limited Trump’s actions on this issue in his first term will be lying in wait for him once again.
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Will anything be different this time around? Yes, and some of the differences are favorable. Veterans of the first administration have learned from their experience. One of the lessons they have learned is to keep their mouths shut. Loose talk on cable news opened up Trump programs to legal challenges on grounds of animus, a legal doctrine that basically allows a judge to invalidate a law if one of its proponents says something mean on TV. It also gave opponents a preview of Team Trump’s intentions, allowing them to prepare their counterattacks in advance.
Another advantage is that Biden has let so many people into the country that the need for action is glaring. It also scrambles the left-wing talking point that illegal immigrants should be left alone because they have put down roots in America. More than 10 million people have arrived under Biden; three years is not enough time to have put down roots in a way that will tug at voters’ heartstrings. Focusing on the millions who have arrived since he left office leaves Trump on favorable ground rhetorically.
Some things will be harder. Trump formed an unlikely bond with his Mexican counterpart last time, which was useful in negotiating things like the Remain in Mexico program; Claudia Sheinbaum is a less sympathetic interlocutor than was AMLO. But overall there is much reason to hope that Trump II will be more effective on immigration than Trump I, especially if he continues to have public opinion behind him.
