In response to my column on the Democrats’ left turn on immigration, a reader named Cameron Koffman emails:
Nice op-ed on immigration, I think you hit the nail on the head. I’m genuinely unsure which party had their shift first. President Obama obviously had DACA and the dreamers, but he was a believer in a strong border and still used rule of law rhetoric up until the end of his Presidency.
It’s also worth noting that Romney was pretty hardline on immigration (save for his self-deportation faux pas) as he railed on amnesty frequently on the campaign trail. Yet, Romney’s rhetoric clearly didn’t stick with voters like Trump’s did. Pew polls show that immigration was way more important to Republicans in 2016 than it was in 2012. Has this been a byproduct of Trump packaging it better to Republicans voters with a robust Nationalist message across the board or instead does it just speak to the fact that conservatives did not mobilize to this hard line stance on immigration until the Democrats abandoned the pretense of rule of law that Obama had?
Many, myself included, laughed at Trump for hyper-focusing on immigration when he started his campaign. Clearly he was right too, but was his success more a product of his message or the fact that Dems shifted first and seemed to abandon the baseline standard that Republicans could tolerate. And if it was due to his message then the implication I guess would be that the Dems shifted in response to Trump as well.
We have some data on how voter sentiment shifted, thanks to the Pew Research Center. It suggests that on the question of whether immigration should be increased or decreased, voters in both parties have moved in a pro-immigration direction since 2006 — but Democrats have moved much more, and started moving earlier.
Pew has also asked whether immigrants strengthen or weaken the country. Similar percentages of Republicans and Democrats picked “strengthen” from 1994 through 2004. Between 2004 and 2010, Republicans became less likely to say that while Democrats stayed flat. Since 2010, Republican agreement with “strengthen” has bounced back but Democratic agreement has risen very sharply.
The pattern on that second question is consistent with a story in which increasing Republican concern about immigration issues (from 2004 through 2010) contributed to a major and prolonged backlash among Democrats.