Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.

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Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.

Voters across party lines shifted to the right on immigration. They blamed Biden-Harris for failing to control the chaotic border.

The surge in migration, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, hardened many Americans’ views on immigration. Credit...Rachel Woolf for The New York Times

By Miriam Jordan

Nov. 6, 2024

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Emily Schaefer supports mass deportations. She wants less immigration. And she opposes a path to citizenship for undocumented people who have been living in the United States for decades.

She is not a Republican.

Ms. Schaefer, 52, is a lifelong Democrat who said that she “cannot stand” Donald J. Trump. Yet she voted for him.

“I have never voted for a Republican, ever. But we are being flooded with immigrants who are prioritized over the needs of citizens,” said Ms. Shaefer, who lives in Beaverton, Ore.

Ms. Schaefer said that Mr. Trump’s tough approach to immigration resonated with her for many reasons. The quality of education at her 15-year-old son’s public school has declined because of the large population of students who do not speak English, she said. In Oregon, many undocumented people are eligible for health care, based on their low incomes. They receive assistance from nonprofits while needy Americans struggle, she said.

“It’s absurd what Biden and Harris have allowed,” she said.

The surge in migration across the southern border, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, has reverberated across the country and hardened many Americans’ views on immigration.

While Republican voters have shown the biggest shift, Democrats and independents have also moved to the right, according to polls conducted in recent months.

In July, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration. That share was 28 percent in 2020.

Mr. Trump rode to victory painting migrants as a menace, an “invasion” of foreigners from developing countries who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Resolving the problem would demand a “bloody story,” he said — an operation to deport immigrants en masse. He would invoke the Alien Enemies Act , an obscure, centuries-old law to achieve it.

Recent polling found that a majority of voters favored elements of Mr. Trump’s approach.

Fifty-seven percent of voters in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in October said they supported deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, including about 30 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents.

Slightly more than half of voters nationally, including 20 percent of Democrats, said they supported a wall on the border with Mexico, a marked increase from 2016 and 2020, when about 40 percent supported building a wall.

“There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute.

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In July, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

During President Biden’s term, political turmoil, criminal violence, climate change and the economic ruin wrought by the coronavirus pandemic in many countries fueled migration at a scale not seen since World War II. Beyond the factors driving migrants out of their home countries, the U.S. job market was a powerful draw, with unemployment at its lowest level in decades.

“Changes in the global migration system made it inevitable that there would be increased pressure on the U.S. border,” said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration scholar and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.

But Republicans, Democrats and independents interviewed by The Times blamed the Biden administration for failing to acknowledge the chaos at the border and promptly take aggressive steps to address it.

Karen Bobis, 25, a registered independent who is originally from the Philippines, said that she had cast a ballot for Mr. Trump because of his stance on illegal immigration.

While she and other family members had waited years to win approval to immigrate legally to the United States, she said, people without permission were walking right into the country.

They should follow the process, with “paperwork and everything,” said Ms. Bobis, who voted on Tuesday outside Reno, Nev.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general, touted her record as a border-state prosecutor who took on drug cartels and gangs, and her ads championed her support for “the toughest border control bill in decades,” a bipartisan bill that collapsed after Mr. Trump urged his party not to support it.

“I was so angry, just so angry, that a lot of the Democratic Party wouldn’t say it was a crisis, let alone propose anything to deal with it,” said Sonya Duffy, 53, a Democrat who lives in New York City. She said that she voted for Ms. Harris because reproductive rights were her overriding issue.

The gravity of the border problem “clicked,” she said, when migrants, by the thousands, began arriving on buses sent by Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, to Democratic strongholds like New York. Many of the arrivals were Venezuelans, a new migratory wave, who lacked relatives or a network to assist them. They quickly strained the resources of Chicago, Denver and New York, where they packed hotels and food banks.

Unlawful crossings have fallen precipitously since June, when President Biden imposed new restrictions at the border on claiming asylum, a protection that was increasingly being invoked by migrants who were not in fact fleeing persecution in their homelands. But that drop in crossings wasn’t enough to counter Mr. Trump’s forceful rhetoric.

Rodrigo Garcia, 26, grew up in a Mexican American family. On Tuesday, in Milwaukee, he voted for Donald Trump a second time.

“I feel like there should be a certain limit of the people that come into America, instead of just letting everybody come in,” he said.

While most voters favored mass deportation, according to a national Times/Siena poll in October, just as large a share, 57 percent, supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the country. About 20 percent supported both mass deportation and a pathway to citizenship, and that group tilted toward Ms. Harris.

“What this mixed vision of specific policies suggests is that for some voters, immigration has become a sort of proxy for what kind of country the United States will be: open and diverse, or closed and culturally homogeneous,” said Sarah Coleman, an immigration historian at Texas State University.

Anti-immigrant sentiment historically increases when people worry about the economy, and inflation was a major concern this election cycle.

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Migrants’ clothing on barbed wire, left after they swam to U.S. soil in Eagle Pass, Texas.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

“The Trump campaign did an excellent job of convincing people there is an immigration crisis and connecting that to the economy,” Ms. Coleman said.

Back in 2015, Mr. Trump’s opening salvo in his first campaign was against Mexican migrants, whom he called rapists. He vowed to build a “great, great wall” along the southern border that Mexico would pay for, and to deport those unlawfully in the country.

Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton.

After a lull, during which prospective migrants and smuggling networks assessed the new administration, the numbers of border crossers began to climb.

By 2019, interceptions at the U.S.-Mexico border were at their highest annual level in more than a decade — 851,508, or more than double the previous year’s, even after Mr. Trump introduced the widely condemned policy of taking migrant children from their parents in an attempt to deter family immigration.

That year, 65 percent of Americans told a Pew Research Center survey that the government was doing a bad job at the border.

In March 2020, as the pandemic took hold, the Trump administration invoked a public health emergency to seal the border. Under the statute, Title 42, some 400,000 migrants were detained and swiftly expelled back to Mexico, where encampments sprung up in border towns, such as Reynosa and Matamoros, that are controlled by drug cartels. Human rights groups reported a spate of kidnappings and torture.

Yet in 2020, half of all Democrats told Gallup they wanted “more immigration,” up from 30 percent in 2016, the most favorable stance toward immigration in 15 years.

“Trump’s position was extreme, and he caused a swing in the other direction,” said Diana Mutz, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. After narrowly defeating Mr. Trump in 2020, Mr. Biden entered office in 2021 promising a humane approach to the border, and he began reversing his predecessor’s policies.

But as the pandemic subsided, pent-up demand and persistent hardship drove large numbers of people to the United States from as far away as China and India. Newly forged migratory routes and social media, which expanded smugglers’ reach, facilitated movement across continents. Venezuelans fled their country’s political and economic turmoil.

Migrants braved turbulent rivers, cut through concertina wire and scaled the steel border wall to reach the United States and turn themselves in to border agents. Thousands were detained and quickly deported, but many more were released into the country with dates for deportation hearings far into the future. They applied for asylum, which made them eligible for work permits, but still relied on assistance from the government and nonprofits to get by for months, until they received the documents.

In January 2023, the Biden administration introduced measures that it hoped would restore some order to the border. Nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who had financial sponsors in the United States could apply to live and work in the United States temporarily. Migrants who journeyed over land to the southern border were encouraged to use a new government app to schedule appointments to cross at official ports of entry.

But after a brief slowdown, unlawful entries began to rise again, surpassing 300,000 in December, the most of any single month on record.

Mr. Trump exploited the soaring numbers to animate his base and garner support for a third presidential run.

Reporting was contributed by Alex Hoeft in Reno, Nev.; Ruth Igielnik in New York; and Dan Simmons in Milwaukee.

Miriam Jordan reports from a grass roots perspective on immigrants and their impact on the demographics, society and economy of the United States. More about Miriam Jordan