How the GOP Mainstreamed Mass Deportation
The Influence of Immigration on the 2024 Election
After testing 25 different reasons why voters chose to vote against Kamala Harris, Democratic polling firm Blueprint discovered that "Too many illegal aliens crossed the border under the Biden-Harris administration" was the 2nd most common reason, outranking all other reasons except inflation. Pundits have cranked out numerous self-serving takes about why Harris lost to Trump in the 2024 election, but when YouGov survey asked American voters themselves, over half of voters concluded that it was primarily driven by two issues: inflation and the state of the economy (40%) followed by immigration (11%).
Two infographics from AP Votecast show that the salience of immigration as a political issue massively increased in 2024 when compared to the 2020 election. In 2020, COVID-19 was overwhelmingly the top issue (41%), followed by the economy (28%) and health care (9%). Immigration had such low salience in 2020 that it wasn't even labeled on the graph. Based on the small size of the circle for immigration in the 2020 infographic, I suspect that the George Floyd protests of 2020 kept immigration off the agenda by making issues such as racism and policing more salient instead. By contrast, in 2024, immigration was the #2 top issue cited by 20% of voters, an increase of over 500% in how much voters paid attention to the issue.
According to a Pew Research Center report, the increased importance placed on immigration in the 2024 was primarily driven by Trump supporters, whereas Harris supporters placed immigration dead last in importance.
In the 2024 presidential race, Trump supporters place far more importance on immigration than Harris supporters. For Trump supporters, 82% say immigration is very important to their vote in the 2024 presidential election, trailing only the economy in importance, according to a Center survey conducted in late August to early September. By contrast, just 39% of Harris supporters say the issue of immigration is very important to their presidential vote this year, behind all other issues asked about in the survey, including health care, Supreme Court appointments, the economy, abortion, gun policy and climate change.
The increased importance that voters placed on immigration in 2024 cannot be attributed to increases in immigration alone. The number of migrants intercepted by U.S. Border patrol agents was over 3 times higher in the fall of 2022, when Democrats overperformed in the Congressional midterm election, than in August 2024.
Despite the increased border crossings in 2022, a poll by Statista showed that immigration was only the 4th most important issue to voters that year, trailing behind the economy (#1), abortion (#2), and healthcare (#3).
Instead, we need to look at the GOP coalition, the media, and the development of the Harris vs. Trump campaign itself to understand why immigration increased so much in importance.
How GOP Placed Mass Deportation on the Agenda
I like to trace the increasing salience of the immigration issue in 2024 by looking at the concept known as “mass deportation.” When I did a Google Books search of the term “mass deportation,” it generally appeared in books that were referring to acts committed by autocratic, fascist, or totalitarian regimes (e.g., Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia) that were in power during World War I and World War II. When I look at increasing usage of “mass deportation” in the Google Books Archive in books published after 1980, in most cases, “mass deportation” is assumed to be a bad thing, and most books that mention it are writing sympathetically about the victims of mass deportation.
The term had such negative connotations that, in 2017, the anti-immigrant think tank The Center for Immigration Studies published an article titled Mass Deportations vs. Mass Legalizations: A False Choice. At the time, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) claimed that "mass deportation" wasn't seriously being discussed as a policy proposal, but instead, it was a merely a bogeyman used by alarmist pro-immigration advocates who artificially wanted to limit immigration policy debate a false dichotomy of mass legalization vs. mass deportation.
Instead of promoting mass deportations, CIS's favored anti-immigration policy was "attrition through enforcement"(https://cis.org/Report/Attrition-Through-Enforcement), a strategy that stressed reducing immigration through a cost-effective approach similar to "downsizing" in large companies. According to this policy model, increased enforcement of immigration laws would give more immigrants the incentive to leave the United States voluntarily, which in turn would reduce the total numbers of immigrants in the country altogether. Eventually, conservative Republican policy wonks adopted the CIS attrition through enforcement approach, which later became the basis for a 2006 anti-immigration bill from the House GOP. According to a press release that CIS released that year, 56% of voters favored the CIS/GOP House "attrition through enforcement" approach, whereas only 12% favored the most extreme option of "mass deportations and roundups."
The attrition through enforcement policy was still popular among Republican policy intellectuals in 2012, when future GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney said he favored "self-deportation", which had been adopted as a shorthand term for attrition through enforcement. Unfortunately for Romney, his use of the wonky term "self-deportation" in a 2012 Republican primary debate drew laughter from the audience. A year after Romney's 2012 loss to Obama, Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus called Romney's use of the term "horrific" and blamed Romney's usage of the term for hurting the GOP's electoral chances.
By 2024, GOP elites had moved beyond softer anti-immigration proposals, such as "self-deportation," in favor of embracing mass deportations wholeheartedly. The turning point came on June 4, 2024, when Joe Biden signed an executive action ordered asylum requests at the border to be shut down if they exceed over 2,500 per day. In a press conference later that day, several Republican Senators denounced Biden's executive order as not harsh enough.
According to Senator Lindsey Graham's statement,
And if you wanna shut down illegal immigration, those coming need to see an outflow by the tens and hundreds of thousands. That will deter. The only policy change that will work is to have mass deportations. Because people will stop coming when they see people leaving.
A few days later, CBS/YouGov released a poll (taken over June 5-7, 2024) that asked the question, “Would you favor or oppose the U.S. government starting a new national program to deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally?” The results indicated that 62% of voters favored the idea, while only 38% opposed. The results were striking. It was no surprise that 88% of Republicans favored the proposal, but so did 60% of independents and 38% of Democrats. There were 88% of conservatives in favor of the proposal, but so were 26% of liberals, 47% of Black voters, and 53% of Hispanic voters.
I think the CBS/YouGov poll is reflective of widespread general anti-immigrant attitudes in the general public, even in an unexpected places. However, I don’t think it is necessarily proof that a Trump-style policy of mass deportation would get majority support. The poll not only doesn’t say the word “mass deportation”; it’s not a good measurement of whether people support mass deportation as a policy. If a pollster includes a phrase like “currently living in the U.S. illegally,” that may prime the survey respondents to assume that the proposed policy will only go after criminals. After all, why include the word “illegally” if you’re not going after the real criminals?
The problem is that respondents to a survey may not realize that, for most immigrants, the only illegal act they have is being an undocumented immigrant, a behavior criminalized in American immigration law as “unlawful presence.” Respondents may be thinking of drug traffickers and murderous gang members as the target of this hypothetical policy, but in practice, the victims of immigration dragnets include a Polish-American doctor with a green card or a Bangladeshi chemisty professor in Kansas with visa issues. By placing a frame of illegality and criminality around immigration, both survey researchers and politicians can create the appearance of greater popular consent for xenophobic immigration policies.
After the results of the CBS/YouGov survey came out, the CBS talking heads show, Face the Nation, brought Senator Lindsey Graham on its Sunday, July 9th broadcast. Before Senator Graham spoke, the host Margaret Brennan introduced CBS's top pollster Anthony Salvanto to summarize the results of the latest CBS/YouGov poll:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Trump's been perceived as stronger on the border. Does this change anything?
ANTHONY SALVANTO: No, Trump still is. More people think that Donald Trump's policies would stop or slow border crossings more than Biden.
Having said that, there is widespread support when we test in general terms for what President Biden just did. He gets seven in 10 support on that. It's overwhelming among Republicans. It's also strong among Democrats.
Look, context there, people have said they think that the border is in crisis for a long time. Having said that, we have a lot of the campaign rhetoric, speaking of what people say they would do. You have seen the Trump campaign talking about mass deportations.
We tested that in a general way in principle. Would you support a new government program that would deport all people living in the U.S. illegally? And that finds majority favor. That finds six in 10. It's strongest among folks who are MAGA. It's strongest among Trump supporters, but also from some Democrats as well.
And I think that that speaks to the general idea, not just that people see the border as a crisis, but also where we are in the campaign, where a lot of very dramatic or, you know, new proposals out there are finding favor here.
If you look at the wording of the question, Salvanto is generally accurate in representing the wording of the original question. On the other hand, Salvanto goes too far by claiming that the question is a good measurement of the mainstream popularity of mass deportations, as opposed to a policy that would only deport the “bad immigrants” who are otherwise engaging in criminal behavior (e.g., drug trafficking, violent gang activity), not related to civil immigration law violations.
The host Margaret Brennan then pushed back against Senator Lindsey Graham stated support for mass deportations. She bought into Graham’s framing and tried to curry favor with the senator by claiming that the Biden administration should also get credit for the “mass deportations” of 740K people, but the senator would not be satisfied unless millions more were deported.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Very quickly, before I let you go, in this past year the Biden administration deported, expelled or repatriated more than 740,000 people, which they say is more than any year since 2010. You, this week, said there need to be mass deportations.
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: Yes, there will be.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Aren't those numbers mass deportations?
SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM: They've had 10 million people come into this country illegally. It's the highest level of illegal immigration in the last three years, in the history of the country. We went from the lowest under Trump to the highest in recorded history. They're never going to stop coming until they see people leaving.
By the time the Republican National Convention rolled around in mid-July, Usha Vance, the Indian-American wife of Donald Trump’s running mate, was giving a speech extolling her immigrant parents, while at the same time, the predominantly white crowd waved red-white-and-blue banners of “Mass Deportations Now.” A once unthinkable policy, reminiscent of World War II-era totalitarian governments, was now fully mainstreamed by a major political party. As late as the 2010s, Republicans would gaslight you and accuse you of being unfair if you said they supported mass deportation, but now under Trump 2.0, they have embraced it wholeheartedly, while the Biden Administration, the pollsters, and the media did nothing to stop it.
