The clever politics of Republicans’ anti-immigrant pitch

It wasn’t groundbreaking that the speakers who took to the Republican National Convention stage Tuesday spent much of the night railing against President Joe Biden’s border and immigration policies. Biden was enabling a “border bloodbath,” crowd signs read, as congressional leaders accused Biden of enabling a border “invasion.” 

Nor was it new to see them use provocative, inflammatory, or extremist rhetoric to talk about immigrants and the Democratic incumbents. “Every day Americans are dying,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz thundered, “murdered, assaulted, and raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”

What was clear is how the Republican Party of 2024 has fine-tuned its anti-immigration message for the American electorate of 2024: focusing on drugs, human trafficking, crime, and public disorder, and distinguishing between “illegal” immigrants who threaten the fabric of America and the right kind of migrant.

Kari Lake, the election-denying GOP Senate candidate from Arizona, summed it up early in the night: The goal of the GOP must be to “stop the Bidenvasion and build the wall.”

This all happened the night after Republican organizers tried to preach national unity in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and some speakers said they toned down their speeches.

But the Republican Party’s position on immigration might be more unifying than it looks. The data shows that Americans are much more against all kinds of immigration and more likely to favor more stringent border controls and immigration policies than when Trump ran for office the first or second time.

Indeed, the America of 2024 is more anti-immigrant than in the recent past, more skeptical of immigration, and more open to policies that would have seemed extreme if they had been enacted when Trump was in office. This is in part because there really was an influx of migrants and a spike in border-crossing after Biden took office and as the pandemic wound down.

This anti-immigrant shift has been quick but sustained. Since 2020, the share of Americans wanting the level of all immigration to decrease has shot up, from 28 percent in the middle of 2020 to 55 percent as of June 2024, according to Gallup polling data. 

Those analysts note that 2024 is the first time since 2005 that the majority of the American public has wanted less immigration and that this anti-immigration sentiment is at its highest point since 2001, when the country was going through another bout of anti-immigrant fervor after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Those shifts are also happening across all sectors of the electorate. It’s not just white voters. Nonwhite voters and especially Latino voters are more likely than in the past to want less immigration, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rising across all partisan groups, including among Democrats. 

During the Trump years, the overall mood of the country shifted to be more pro-immigrant as Democratic voters became much more positive about immigration. That trend has shifted, even over the past year.

The opinions don’t lack nuance. Voters are much more positive on legal migration than illegal immigration. They are more supportive of building a wall along the southern border with Mexico than they were during the Trump years, but they are also still receptive to providing a pathway to citizenship for those immigrants brought illegally into the United States as children (though even support for these Dreamers has steadily dropped).

Overall, though, when thinking about the border and immigration, many Americans now seem to view the issue less as one about humanitarianism and human rights, and more through the lens of law and order, immigration researchers have observed.

All of this was reflected in the position many Republican rising stars, candidates, and elected officials took on Tuesday night. Senate candidates, including Bernie Moreno of Ohio, Lake of Arizona, and Eric Hovde of Wisconsin, as well as former candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, all talked about the benefits of legal immigration and the American dream while playing up the threat of fentanyl trafficking and immigrant drains on the American economy. 

They warned of the threat that an “invasion” at the southern border posed to the American dream. Moreno, himself a Colombian immigrant, emphasized that he and his parents immigrated to the US “legally” — then attacked Biden and Democrats for “encourag[ing] millions of illegals to invade America.”

Other Republican leaders, like House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Speaker Mike Johnson, played up the threat of non-citizen voting changing the fabric of the nation, “harm[ing] citizens, drain[ing] resources, and disrupt[ing] elections,” as Johnson said.

The night’s closing message rounded out this critique of the status quo: “You can’t have a nation without borders.” It’s a simple pitch to those Americans who view migration as a question of order and process: upset at images of migrant caravans and river crossings, even if they don’t necessarily dislike the idea of extending the American dream.

In 2019, while Trump was in office, this strategic speech might not have resonated with most Americans. But in 2024, it’s ringing true to a growing share of the electorate.