Is anti-immigrant sentiment fading?
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On his Saturday morning CNN show, Michael Smerconish routinely asks his audience to respond to a “poll question.” In a recent program, Smerconish asked his viewers whether ICE should deport people who had come to the U.S. illegally or overstayed a visa but had lived here for years while paying taxes and breaking no laws. The question generated 75,637 responses of which over 85% rather startlingly said “no.”
Responses to the questions need to treated with some care because, as Smerconish readily admits, they are generated by a process scarcely considered scientific and because CNN viewers likely have something of a liberal bias. But even discounting substantially for this, the number generated by this question is quite striking, and it suggests that Donald Trump may well have overestimated the popularity of anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States.
As often noted, Trump seems to be quite susceptible to the vicissitudes of public opinion following the example of one of his heroes, Rush Limbaugh, who contended that he thrived “because I validate what millions of Americans already think—that is, public opinion is often less manipulated than manipulating. Thus, Trump was prominent among the Japan-bashers when they were popular in the early 1990s. But when he tried to sell that perspective again in 2016 as he started his first successful campaign for the Presidency, he found that it no longer sold with the public and had been replaced by China bashing. So motivated, Trump was soon doubling down on the threat supposedly presented by China and he populated his administration with prominent and articulate China bashers—as did the similarly-motivated Biden administration after 2020.
Interestingly, public opinion on the China issue had shifted somewhat by 2024, inspired perhaps by the fact that China no longer seemed, like Japan’s before it, to be so threatening as its economy began to tank or stagnate. At any rate, the issue came up only rarely in the presidential campaign of that year even as the professional China bashers continued to operate and were welcomed in a muted way into the second Trump administration.
Following international trends, the issue that now took the limelight was immigration. Trump was soon generating approval by blasting immigrants as an invasion by bands of criminals and crazy people.
Poll data like Smerconish’s as well as the public’s negative response to ICE’s overzealous anti-immigration tactics in Minnesota suggest that the anti-immigration position is not all that deep—and, indeed, Thump has already shown signs of mellowing the policy.
Thus, pro-immigration campaigners, while supporting the ban on importing seasoned criminals, would do well to emphasize that even people who enter the country illegally are less likely to commit crimes than US citizens and that most turn out to be taxpaying entities whose working contribution should be welcomed in a country with such a low unemployment rate and with an aging population.