Former President Donald J. Trump has described his plans to remove large numbers of unauthorized immigrants from the country if elected to a second term by citing the mass deportations under President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.
In that initiative, federal agents and law enforcement officers used military techniques such as sweeps, raids and surveillance checkpoints — as well as a blunt form of racial profiling — to round up undocumented workers and load them onto buses and boats. As many as 1.3 million people were expelled, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers, some of whom were U.S. citizens. Critical to the initiative — named Operation Wetback, for the racial slur — was intense anti-immigrant sentiment. Officials at the time used that sentiment to justify family separations and overcrowded and unsanitary detention conditions — practices that the Trump administration would deploy decades later in its own immigration enforcement.
As the 2024 presidential election heats up, some Latino advocacy and immigrant-rights groups are sounding the alarm that Mr. Trump’s tactics could amount to a repetition of a sordid chapter of American history. But recent polling shows that Mr. Trump’s position on immigration appears to be resonating. About half of Americans have said they would support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, according to a CNN poll conducted by the research firm SSRS in January.
Authorities have reported record numbers of migrant apprehensions at the southern border for three straight years, including 2.4 million apprehensions in the fiscal year that ended in September 2023. Although the numbers have dropped sharply in recent months, immigration remains an albatross for President Biden: Even some Democratic mayors have complained that they need help from the federal government to contend with the migrant populations in their cities.
Americans’ views on immigration are complex and constantly changing. Here is a snapshot of where public attitudes on immigration stand now.
Public support for more immigration has ebbed after rising under Trump.
Mr. Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, both legal and illegal, helped push Americans of various political stripes to support more permissive policies.
During his first term, Mr. Trump narrowed the path to asylum, sharply reduced the numbers of visas and refugee admissions and enacted a travel ban on people from several countries, most of which had Muslim majorities. His administration rolled back protections for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children, and it separated migrant families at the southern border.
By the time he left the White House, more Americans favored increasing immigration for the first time in six decades of Gallup polling.
But more recent surveys from Gallup and others have found that the number of people who believe immigration is generally beneficial to the country’s culture and economic growth has been slowly eroding from a recent high. A small but growing minority of Americans are increasingly concerned about its impact on drugs, crime, taxes and national identity.
An open-ended Gallup poll released on April 30 found that, for the third straight month, most Americans cited immigration as the most important problem facing the United States. That was the longest stretch that the issue had topped the list in the survey’s 24-year history. A Gallup poll released on Friday showed immigration dropping to second on the list in May, still high by historical standards.
It is not just unauthorized immigration causing consternation. A different poll in March from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that Americans have become more worried about legal immigrants committing crimes, though many studies have found no correlation between immigration and crime, regardless of whether people entered the country legally or not.
In February, a nationwide New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 49 percent of voters either strongly or somewhat supported making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States, slightly more than the 43 percent who either strongly or somewhat opposed doing so.
Americans’ views on immigration largely split along partisan lines.
As Democrats and Republicans have drifted further apart on immigration, Republicans are far more likely to cite immigration as a top concern.
A Pew study in February found that 70 percent of Republicans described the challenges at the southern border as a “crisis,” compared with just 22 percent of Democrats. Another poll last year from Gallup showed 73 percent of Republicans wanted immigration to be decreased. By contrast, only 18 percent of Democrats said they wanted the same. Republicans were also far more likely to see immigrants as worsening the country’s social and moral values, job opportunities and taxes.
While the nation has experienced waves of anti-immigrant sentiment since its founding, immigration scholars and lawyers trace the emergence of the modern rift to the 1960s. The passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 — which was influenced by the civil rights movement and aimed to abolish the immigrant quota system based on nationality, race and ancestry — prompted an increase in immigration from Asian, African and Latin American countries. It set in motion the national demographic changes against which today’s political dispute is playing out.
And yet, there are some areas of agreement.
For years, a plurality of American voters said they wanted compromise from lawmakers: equal priority given to providing legal pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the country, as well as border security and stronger law enforcement measures. This was the case in Pew surveys from 2010 to 2018.
But in recent years, a majority of Americans have come to see the situation at the border as a problem, according to the Pew study in February. Most Americans — including majorities of both Republicans and Democrats — have given the Biden administration negative ratings in its handling of immigration. Matt A. Barreto, a Democratic pollster who works with the Biden campaign, said that polling should not be seen as a reflection of support for proposals like mass deportations, but that it does capture frustration with Washington’s inaction on the issue. Biden campaign officials say the administration has sought to address that sentiment.
“President Biden worked in good faith with Republicans and Democrats to negotiate a deal that would have delivered additional resources and personnel to enhance border security, expanded lawful immigration pathways and began fixing our broken immigration system,” said Maca Casado, the Biden campaign’s Hispanic media director. But Republicans blocked the bipartisan legislation twice, the first time after Mr. Trump vocally opposed it.
Despite the gridlock in Washington, that February poll from Pew also showed that most Americans agreed on policies to address the situation. About 60 percent — including about 40 percent of Republicans — believed that increasing the number of immigration judges and staff members at the border would improve matters. Nearly as many, about 56 percent, believed that creating more legal pathways for people to come to the United States would make things better as well.
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