Why everyone refuses to believe what voters are telling them about immigration
Why everyone refuses to believe what voters are telling them about immigration
Republicans keep losing on the issue, yet Democrats are supposed to be the ones who don't get it.
Republicans just lost yet another election in which they figured fear-mongering on immigration was all they needed to succeed. Now they’re embarking on a farcical impeachment of Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas for imaginary crimes and misdemeanors, because just as they believe that khaki-clad trips to the southern border are public relations gold, they think impeaching Mayorkas will help Donald Trump win November’s election and secure their razor-thin House majority, simply by keeping the issue of immigration in the news.
Despite the GOP’s record of repeated failure to turn immigration into electoral results, the vast majority of the political class in Washington — including Republicans, Democrats, and journalists — remains convinced that the losing Republican strategy is actually brilliant, and it’s the Democrats who need to change their ways. The issue of immigration, they assume, is a kind of electoral magic weapon whose unstoppable power will slay all Democrats who stand before it.
But they’re just wrong. The voters keep telling them so, and they refuse to accept it.
Look at the latest example, the special election to fill George Santos’ seat in the House. Republicans put all their eggs in the “Immigration Crisis!” bandwagon, assuming that it would carry them to victory in this swing district. This ad from the Republican nominee, Mazi Pilip, gives you the flavor of their campaign — though you might want to watch it with a sock stuffed in your mouth to stifle your screams of terror.
Pilip’s Democratic opponent, Tom Suozzi, followed a simple strategy in response: He talked about immigration in perfectly reasonable terms, advocating a compromise plan that joined border enforcement with a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. He attacked Pilip over the fact that her party’s congressional yahoos torpedoed an immigration bill that gave them much of what they were asking for, because Donald Trump told them to. Having defused the immigration issue, he centered his campaign on abortion, pummeling Pilip mercilessly for wanting to take away women’s reproductive rights. He won easily.
We’ve seen that scenario play out again and again in recent campaigns: Republicans run fear-based campaigns full of rancid xenophobia, they lose, and the lesson everyone seems to take from it is that immigration is a winner for Republicans and Democrats had better wise up.
The GOP’s genius strategy that keeps failing
Consider some recent history. In 2018, Trump and Republicans put their midterm hopes on a furious campaign to get everyone talking about “caravans” of supposed gang members and terrorists heading north through Mexico, who upon reaching the US border would pour into our country and kill us all.
Republicans aired thousands and thousands of ads about immigration that year, while Democrats talked mostly about health care. And what happened? Democrats won a sweeping victory and took back the House. Then Trump and many down-ballot Republicans ran against immigrants in 2020 and lost, Republicans ran against immigrants in 2022 and lost, and Democrats keep winning these special elections where Republicans base their campaigns on immigration.
How many times will we watch Republican candidates fail with fear-mongering campaigns on immigration before people realize that maybe their assumptions about how this issue operates are wrong?
But how can that be, one might ask, when polls show that Americans trust Republicans more on immigration?
Misreading the polls
Polls do show that Republicans have an abstract advantage on immigration, when you ask the most general questions possible. But polls also show that most Americans’ views on immigration are more complicated and nuanced than Republicans (and plenty of Democrats) believe. For instance, a recent UMass poll shows that 48 percent of Americans support building a wall on the southern border, but 63 percent support citizenship for Dreamers, the immigrants who were brought to America as children — something most Republicans in Congress and Donald Trump oppose. A majority (52 percent) also support a path to citizenship for other undocumented immigrants.
While the impulse to build walls is real, Republicans have not won the fundamental argument. Are there lots of hateful blood-and-soil xenophobes out there? Indeed there are. But most Americans have complicated views on immigration and can be pushed toward either party’s position, depending on how the question is framed, what options are on the table, and how the issue interacts with other things they care about.
Despite the default assumption that Republicans are “tougher,” the deeper voters are drawn into a debate about immigration, the worse Republicans do, likely because of their combination of extremism and incompetence. And they’ve changed their position: Up until Trump took over their party, the standard Republican line (one that reflected most Americans’ views) was “I support legal immigration, but not illegal immigration.” They don’t say that anymore; now they want to limit all immigration and their leader talks about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Their base has followed them there, but while most rank-and-file Republicans now believe immigration is bad for the country, most non-Republicans disagree:
Misinterpreting 2016
The 2016 election has cast a shadow over the way nearly everyone interprets this issue, so much so that it leads people to ignore or deny the results of literally every election we’ve had since then. Because Donald Trump ran a relentlessly xenophobic campaign and managed to prevail in the Electoral College, everyone assumes that 1) it must have been the xenophobia that pulled him to victory, and 2) xenophobia therefore has an unstoppable electoral power.
But there isn’t much evidence that either one of those propositions is true. And the second one keeps getting tested, and failing. When you get into a campaign where both sides are making arguments, plans are being put forward, and immigration is competing with other issues, Democrats win again and again, just as Suozzi did. Immigration isn’t a trump card Republicans can slap on the table that beats every other hand — even though they clearly think it is. They keep trying, and they keep losing.
A smarter group of people might be able to turn their basic advantage on immigration into actual results — but these Republicans are not smart people. The Mayorkas impeachment shows how. The appointed impeachment managers — the members who will be making the case against Mayorkas on TV — are exactly the collection of far-right nincompoops you’d expect, including loony conspiracy theorist Clay Higgins, Andy Biggs (who reportedly asked Trump for a pardon for his role in the attempt to overthrow the government on January 6), and of course, the inimitable Marjorie Taylor Green. That’s not the direction you go if you’re trying to assemble a case that will persuade the greatest number of voters.
Democrats can keep winning campaigns by showing that they value immigration and also want an immigration system that actually works, something Republicans clearly don’t. And maybe some day, the savvy set in Washington will be willing to accept what’s right in front of their eyes.
I don't think it's possible to overstate how badly House Repubs have sabotaged themselves by refusing to take up the Senate's bipartisan immigration bill AND impeaching Mayorkas, while loudly stating the whole time how they're just doing what Trump is telling them to do. They're telegraphing their own fundamental unseriousness, cravenness, and hypocrisy -- about immigration and good governance in general -- in such a big way that it plays all the way to the balcony.
Every Democrat running for a competitive House seat this year should follow Suozzi's lead by flipping the script about which party is serious about immigration reform (and more humane to boot), and pivoting to abortion and fundamental freedom issues. I believe healthcare also remains a potent issue for voters, as Trump has clearly stated his intent to take another run at Obamacare repeal (still with nary a "replacement" plan in sight), which would drop coverage entirely for tens of millions of Americans and return the rest of us to the bad old days of preexisting condition exclusions and lifetime benefits caps.
Unfortunately, the nincompoops in Congress get more attention, and press coverage, than do those who actually have functioning intellects and an understanding of what democracy is.
And when it comes to Trump, he's the biggest useful idiot in our country's history, a grifter who's being scammed by the extremists he claims to "lead." And the media plays along.