When President Donald Trump won the 2024 election, many American voters wanted to reduce immigration, and Trump quickly complied. He increased funding for immigration enforcement, opened new detention centers and pushed more Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as Customs and Border Patrol, into US cities.
While American disapproval of immigration was key to Trump winning two presidential elections, polls today show a growing divide.
Gallup It found 30 percent of Americans want to reduce immigration, down from 55 percent a year ago. A New York Times/Siena National PollA majority of voters still disapprove of immigration but also say Trump’s actions on enforcement have gone too far.
According to immigration reporter Molly O’Toole, the move is a response to Trump’s oversimplified message that “all immigration is bad.” He said it was a successful message with no effective countervailing force until people saw Trump’s deportation strategy firsthand.
talking to Today, explained Joined by fill-in host Asted Herndon, O’Toole explains why capturing voter attitudes on immigration often misses nuance and why it may not deter The president’s push for faster and more extreme methods of arrest.
Below is a portion of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s more in the full episode, so take a listen Today, explained Wherever you find podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, pandoraAnd Spotify.
Recently, I’ve been curious about how the public is reacting to Trump’s immigration campaign. Because, on the one hand, he made all these promises, and you could argue that voters know what they’re signing up for. But now they’re seeing it in real life, are they having buyer’s remorse?
What Trump has done very effectively is shift the American public’s perception of immigration to the right. If you look at the polls, there is much more bipartisan support for immigration and overwhelmingly positive views of immigration writ than you would think based on the rhetoric we’ve heard and the electoral success.
Instead of a conversation where illegal immigration is “bad” but refugees, asylum seekers and other forms of legal immigration are “good” — which is how the debate broke down in the pre-Trump era — now, you have “all immigration is bad.” And, in that way, I think the Trump administration has been remarkably effective in changing the nature of the conversation.
This speaks to something that Democrats have done for the past several years, which is to agree with Trump’s base rather than offering their own positive vision. How did you see it?
exactly Trump has a strategy here and it’s working. But it’s easy to shift the whole conversation to one side of the spectrum if there’s no balance on the other side.
Some recent polls show that most voters want to deport immigrants who came to the country illegally, but they don’t necessarily like the way the administration is doing it. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? Voters want deportation, but not like this.
This is the complexity of the issue and political messaging is not a useful tool for communicating something this complex. Because Trump shifted the conversation to “all immigration is bad,” American voters weren’t thinking, “Well, wait. Actually, a lot of these actions are targeting people who are allowed to be here. They’re asylum seekers. They’re not the horrible kinds of criminals that the Trump campaign was talking about.”
There was a Gallup poll this summer that really drove this home for me. In 2024, 55 percent wanted to cut all immigration, which I think is helpful in understanding what fueled Donald Trump’s comeback. But the same survey this year found that number had dropped by almost half; Only 30 percent wanted to reduce immigration. It seems that now that Donald Trump is in place, perhaps sentiment or public effort has at least shifted in the other direction..
I think the poll is absolutely fascinating, but it’s really hard to know what to attribute it to. It’s hard to know how much of that shift — which is really quite a dramatic shift toward pre-2021 sentiment about immigration — is because people think, “Well, Trump ‘fixed’ the border.” Or does it have to do with how people actually make those promises and “wait a second, I didn’t vote for this”?
It appears the White House is still moving forward with deportations, though there is growing evidence that the public is liking what it sees less of. It is not a bad thing in the normal rules of politics? Why do we think the Trump administration has completely departed from that traditional form of political calculus?
I think the Trump administration has used the media very effectively to suck up all the oxygen in the room as a way to really amplify their messaging. The Trump administration doesn’t really care what the media says about its message; They just want to get this message out. I think what we saw in 2016 — and I think what we saw in 2024 — you can have a very passionate vocal minority that can win an election, even if what they support is not necessarily supported by a majority of the American people.
And so, I think messaging, even though it sounds counterintuitive, is what it’s for. This is for their die-hard supporters. Then, I think there is another layer, which is: they want people to be afraid, to “self-deport”.
The key is intimidation.
Not just the immigrant community; They want people to be afraid to protest. They want people to be afraid to come out. But I think time will tell if it alienates enough people to become a less effective political strategy.
