Axios is out with eye-popping results from a poll it ran.
Axios is out with eye-popping results from a poll it ran, which show the overall popularity of the hard-line immigration proposals Donald Trump has floated in his campaign, including mass deportations of illegal aliens and the end of birthright citizenship.
What it found was that 51 percent of Americans (including 42 percent of Democrats) say they would support mass deportations of illegal aliens. Thirty percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans would end birthright citizenship. The poll shows that Americans are concerned about illegal immigration primarily because of increased crime and drug trafficking, but not far behind are concerns about costs to taxpayers, and potential threats to national security.
There is some evidence that as harsh immigration controls are associated more with Donald Trump, if he wins reelection, Democratic support for those measures would trend downward. Republican support may trend upward.
But overall, these numbers do not shock me. Immigration politics are undergoing a historic transformation worldwide, as receiving Western countries go into steep fertility declines and immigrants are perceived more as “replacements” than “reinforcements.” That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the math. Immigration politics are also undergoing a transformation because the financial and psychological costs of immigration have plummeted in a world of ubiquitous instant global communication. Unlike in the 19th century, immigrants cross oceans now without expecting all their ties to their homeland to shortly wither away. That is why we see a corresponding hardening of borders worldwide. Opinion on immigration continues to shift to more hard-line restrictions in Europe, to the point where “remigration” or resettlement of immigrant-descended legal citizens is now starting to pop up at the margins of polls. Finally, all these trends have been drastically accelerated by the Covid emergency, which was a stress test for every society and government on earth. Many countries whose responses brought about poverty or more serious distress (including China’s) are seeing massive waves of immigrants leave them.