How the parties have realigned on immigration

To anyone familiar with partisan politics in 2022, the immigration battles of 20 or even 10 years ago look like something from another universe.  

In 2007, leftist Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont joined 15 Democrats in blocking a bill from a Republican president that would have provided legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants. 

In 2013, 14 Senate Republicans backed a bill from a Democratic president that would have granted citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants. That measure died in the House. 

Today, Democrats and Republicans could not stand farther apart on immigration. In 2022 Gallup polls, 86 percent of Republicans said they were worried about illegal immigration, compared to 38 percent of Democrats. For many Republicans heading to the polls this fall, the border looms as an unprecedented national crisis.   

In 2001, by contrast, Democrat and Republican views on immigration were more aligned. That year, illegal immigration worried 56 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Republicans. At the time, few in either party worried about immigrants all that much. 

“It’s really only in the last decade that immigration has been viewed as a number-one issue facing the country by, really, anyone,” said Justin Gest, associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University. 

Today, immigration touches a cultural nerve with both parties. Yet, not long ago, the immigration debate was mostly about economics. Pro-labor Democrats feared undocumented immigrants might steal jobs and undercut salaries for Americans. Pro-business Republicans embraced immigrants for their ability to fill low-wage jobs. A parade of Republican presidents and candidates, from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to John McCain, ran on pro-immigration platforms.  

Political scientists say we may never see their like again. 

“It’s very hard to imagine what a pro-immigrant Republican would look like, and how they’d position themselves in their party,” said Michael Jones-Correa, the president’s distinguished professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.  

Immigration emerged as a top-drawer issue for many Republicans with the 2016 election of President Trump, who promised to build a wall between the United States and Mexico to halt illegal crossings for good. 

“Trump sort of ratcheted up the rhetoric against immigration in a way that hadn’t been previously seen,” said Gest, author of the 2022 book ”Majority Minority.” 

Six years later, the border wall remains incomplete and illegal crossings stand at an all-time high. Border agents tracked 2.8 million illegal entries in the fiscal year that ended in September, breaking the previous record by more than 1 million. Agents detained travelers from across the globe, many fleeing unstable economies in Central and South America and beyond.  

Republicans accuse the Biden administration of tacitly encouraging illegal immigration by slackening Trump-era restrictions, admitting unaccompanied children and emboldening thwarted crossers to try again and again.  

Laura Ries, director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the Heritage Foundation, likens current policy to “a catch-and-release program.”  

This year, Republican governors in border states have bused thousands of migrants to New York, Washington, D.C., and other Democrat-led cities in ironic protest. 

Republicans “draw the line at legal versus illegal immigration,” Ries said, supporting one and opposing the other. “But these days, that line is blurred or even erased by the other side.” 

Democrats accuse Republicans of fighting all immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment has swept the globe in recent years, driven by rising tides of migration and embraced by conservative political parties.   

“The wall was a symbol,” said Douglas Rivlin of America’s Voice, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrant rights. “It would have saved us a lot of money if we had just erected a statue of a middle finger and pointed it at Mexico. And it would have had the same effect on illegal immigration.” 

Paradoxically, given the current climate among conservatives, overall American support for immigration runs high. The share of Americans who believe immigration is good for the country reached 77 percent in 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency, up from 57 percent in 2010. It dipped to 70 percent in 2022. 

The national goodwill toward immigrants reflects near-unanimous support among Democrats, many of whom now associate anti-immigrant sentiment with xenophobia or worse. Yet, in the latest Gallup poll on the subject, 46 percent of Republicans agreed with the Democrats that immigration is a net positive. 

“People really do have a romantic view of immigration,” Rivlin said, “and sometimes a cartoonishly negative impression of immigrants.” 

Modern immigration policy begins with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which set a national priority of allowing legal immigration primarily to reunite splintered families, with lower quotas for immigrants seeking employment and political refuge.  

It also ends there. The antiquated immigration system “hasn’t really been revisited in 60 or 70 years,” Jones-Correa said. “And part of the reason it hasn’t been revisited is because of the increasing divide between the two parties.” 

The 1965 act set a framework for legal immigration. Two decades later, Reagan collaborated with a Democratic Congress to address illegal immigration with the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. The agreement satisfied pro-business Republicans and pro-labor Democrats with a carrot-and-stick approach, allowing amnesty for the undocumented while expanding border patrols and penalties for new arrivals.  

“It wasn’t so much about politics back then,” said Ries of the Heritage Foundation. “You weren’t seeing caravans back then. It wasn’t leading to border crises. And so, you would get politicians who would fall on one side or the other of the issue based on the merits.” 

Reagan’s reforms saw a major overhaul in 1996, when former President Clinton, a Democrat, signed legislation that was mostly stick, cracking down on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes or stay too long, and targeting smugglers.  

George W. Bush attempted immigration reform in 2006 and 2007. Former President Obama tried again in 2012 and 2013. Both efforts failed. 

Throughout that era, “immigration was largely a centrist issue that brought together moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats,” Gest said. “And it was a matter of, could you convince enough people on the left and right flank to pass laws.” 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, worked with Bush on the 2007 reform, but only 11 Republicans joined him in the final vote.  

Fourteen Senate Republicans, including Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and every Democrat supported Obama in his 2013 immigration reform. That measure died in the House. 

The anti-immigrant rhetoric that fueled the Trump campaign ignited during the Obama years, part of a broader conservative movement that branded Democrats as hopelessly soft on the border.  

From a conservative perspective, Ries said, Democrats bailed on meaningful immigration reform when they “came to view immigrants as potential voters.”  

The message that Democrats had failed on immigration spread along with the migrants, who had fanned out from border states and immigrant hubs to settle across small-town America starting in the 1990s, catapulting immigration from a regional issue into a national one.  

“I’m walking into my grocery store, and people aren’t speaking English, and it’s not the country I recognize,” Jones-Correa said. “Republican representatives begin listening to their constituents and going, ‘Yeah, this is an issue.’” 

This fall, many Republican candidates are targeting what they perceive as the Biden administration’s immigration missteps on the campaign trail.  

But anti-immigrant politics can exact a price. In 1994, Pete Wilson, then the Republican governor of California, campaigned on Proposition 187, a ballot initiative to bar undocumented immigrants from state services. The measure passed, but the resulting backlash drove Republicans from favor in California.  

Pro-immigrant sentiment also factored in Trump’s defeat at the polls in 2020.  

“Here we are in 2022, and they’re doubling down on the same strategy,” Rivlin said of the Republican effort. “And I think the question is, Does it mobilize the base? Probably. And then you go back to that Pete Wilson example.”