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Jabin Botsford

Donald Trump’s advisers have declared that if he regains the presidency, he will launch an extraordinarily cruel crackdown on immigration. Given that Trump lost reelection in 2020 after attempting a far tamer agenda, advertising such plans might seem like foolish political malpractice.

But the politics of immigration can be peculiar. The public tends to turn on the president in power when the situation on the border goes wrong, leading voters to seek a diametrically different approach — no matter what policies the incumbent has adopted or what their opponent proposes.

In political science jargon, these wild swings against prevailing policy are <a href="https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-does-the-public-move-right-when-policy-moves-left/" target=_blank>known as “thermostatic”</a> public opinion. This is particularly pronounced on immigration given its fiendish complexities, meaning disapproval of the incumbent could allow Trump to win even though he is campaigning on an extreme alternative.

That second-term agenda would revolve around <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/11/us/politics/trump-2025-immigration-agenda.html" target=_blank>what the New York Times calls</a> “giant camps.” While detention centers already exist, the Times reports that Trump and adviser Stephen Miller envision a vastly expanded network that would facilitate the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, including longtime residents with deep ties to communities.

Those camps would also enable Trump to dramatically scale up detention of people seeking asylum, which would be subject to shocking new limits. Trump would reinstate his ban on migrants from majority-Muslim countries, invoke new legal authorities to pursue mass expulsions and enlist the military to help carry them out.

Trump and his advisers see an opening to pursue these ambitions. They believe record new migrant arrivals (because of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/11/world/americas/title-42-migration-us-border.html" target=_blank>factors throughout the Americas</a>) and the strains this has placed on Democratic cities mean “the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction,” as the Times puts it.

Undeniably, the public has soured on President Biden’s handling of the issue. Voters trust Trump on it <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/07/us/elections/times-siena-battlegrounds-registered-voters.html" target=_blank>by wide margins</a>, support making asylum harder and even back his border wall. This has <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/briefing/biden-trump-2024-election.html" target=_blank>pundits opining</a> that the issue now favors Trump. But let’s be clear on why this is happening and what it really means for 2024.

Recall that Trump’s handling of immigration was <i>also</i> deeply unpopular. In April 2019, another time when <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/us/immigration-border-mexico.html#:~:text=As%20many%20as%2027%2C000%20children,a%20bridge%2C%20behind%20razor%20wire." target=_blank>migrant arrivals dominated</a> the news, <a href="https://games-cdn.washingtonpost.com/notes/prod/default/documents/873ceb77-ad0f-439a-891b-d440139189d0/note/fae3467f-5c96-41b7-99ef-cd49f752e038.pdf#page=1" target=_blank>large majorities opposed</a> Trump’s approach, and very small minorities supported a border wall and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/cnn-poll-immigration-border-crisis/index.html" target=_blank>wanted to make it harder</a> to apply for asylum.

While disapproval of Trump <a href="https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/06/18/rel6a.-.immigration.pdf" target="_blank">turned partly on revulsion</a> at his family separation policy, note that even with the border under severe strain, voters opposed restrictive policies across the board. As <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/while-trump-is-closing-the-borders-americans-are-warming-to-immigration/" target="_blank">public opinion researcher Dan Hopkins shows</a>, voters turned strongly against both the wall and deportations. Yet now voters appear open to such <a href="http://policies.do/" target="_blank">policies.</a>

Here’s where thermostatic opinion comes in. Few voters are familiar with the finer points of asylum policy. Nor do most harbor strong ideological opposition to immigration; large majorities have generally regarded legal immigration as a good thing <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx" target=_blank>through both presidencies</a>.

Instead, all indications suggest that voters think the border should be managed and don’t understand why that’s not happening. Under both presidents, imagery of disorder and migrant suffering filled the media, creating the powerful impression that the executive was failing to handle the situation. Naturally, in both cases, majorities disapproved of that handling of it.

“When policy is going badly and people see a Democrat in office, they tend to move in a Republican direction, and vice versa,” Stuart N. Soroka, a professor at UCLA who <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Information-Democracy-Communication-Society-Politics/dp/1108811892/ref=sr_1_1?crid=EIYEEN4EYK61&keywords=stuart+soroka&qid=1699897088&s=books&sprefix=stuart+soroka%2Cstripbooks%2C87&sr=1-1" target=_blank>studies thermostatic opinion</a>, told me. Immigration is susceptible to this, Soroka said, because voters underestimate “how difficult it is to control” and are “entirely reliant on negative, attention-grabbing media content” when forming impressions of the border.

Our immigration laws make this dynamic worse. Migrants are entitled to have their requests for asylum heard, yet Congress <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/border-supplemental-spending-bill" target="_blank">badly underfunds</a> the system for processing them. Even presidents who want to make the legal system facilitate more immigration, as Biden does, are hobbled by decades-old laws governing who gains entry that <a href="https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publications/RethinkingImmigration-ConceptNote-Final.pdf" target="_blank">are out of sync</a> with the realities driving today’s migrations. So, Biden’s disapproval is all but assured to be high, just as it was under Trump.

Ideologues such as Trump and Miller might truly believe the resulting disapproval of Biden means the public will fully embrace their radical vision. It’s telling that Trump, who <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/05/us/politics/trump-immigration-rhetoric.html" target=_blank>recently declared</a> that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” is trumpeting designs with clear White-nationalist implications, such as a revived ban on Muslims and a vision of detention and deportations that appears designed to showcase maximum cruelty for base-thrilling kicks.

Yet the depravities of Trump’s first effort at mass deportations generated intense backlash, and his first attempt at a Muslim ban inspired furious outcry <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-017-9439-z" target=_blank>precisely because it offended</a> many Americans’ vision of inclusive national identity. While the mere promise of a better-managed border would be a formidable argument against Biden, Trump and Miller seem determined to telegraph unbridled nativist savagery, which could well constitute political overreach in 2024.

Alternatively, voters could see the 2024 immigration debate as merely a referendum on Biden, while largely forgetting the horrors that Trump’s agenda visited on the country last time and tuning out his threats of more to come. Given what we know about public opinion, that unbearably perverse possibility is very real.

An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Trumpian Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics

Hunter College, BA in English

Greg Sargent was a columnist. He joined The Washington Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.

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