A year of mass deportation has produced a strange stability in American public opinion. The numbers have barely moved. A fresh AP-NORC survey finds that roughly half of the country believes the administration has overstepped in removing immigrants who are in the United States without legal status. The figure has not budged for more than a year, surviving citywide crackdowns, mass deployments of federal agents, and at least ten deaths linked to run-ins with immigration officers since the drive started.
The stability is the story. A policy this aggressive, with this much visible human cost, should move the polls. It has not. The country has settled into a permanent split, and the administration has learned that a split is enough.
The numbers
The poll found that 47 percent of American adults say the president has exceeded his authority on deportations. About half say he has overreached on restricting legal immigration. On both questions, about three in ten call the level of enforcement appropriate, and roughly two in ten want more of it.
The partisan breakdown explains everything else. Fewer than two in ten Republicans say the president has overreached on removals or on limits to legal immigration. Republicans rate Trump higher on immigration than on any other issue, including the economy and Iran, where his standing has slipped even among his own supporters. The administration does not need a majority to keep the machine running. It needs its base, and the base is satisfied.
The sharpest opposition centers on the tactics. A majority of Americans reject using traffic stops to hunt and detain immigrants, the method behind two fatal ICE shootings in Maine, and reject sending federal agents into American cities. The public’s tolerance runs out at the point where enforcement touches ordinary Americans going about their lives, not at the point where it touches immigrants.
A year of enforcement
The campaign began with a promise of speed and scale, and delivered both. Federal agents have swept through cities and churches. Schools and hospitals have become contested ground, and the encounters have turned deadly more than once. The AP tally of at least ten deaths involving immigration officers is a number the administration does not dispute so much as decline to discuss.
None of it has dented the core Republican coalition. AP-NORC’s data still ranks immigration as the president’s best issue with his own party, a standing that survived a week in July in which three people died in run-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The deaths were national news for a day. The coalition did not waver.
Why the polls do not move
There are two ways to read this. The first is that the country has normalized the campaign. A year of daily enforcement has made mass deportation a fact of American life, and publics adapt to facts, even unpleasant ones. The proportion calling the effort excessive has flattened out because the shock has faded.
The second reading is that the policy is not aimed at the polls at all. The administration’s audience is its own voters, who were promised a crackdown and are watching it happen. The 47 percent who object are not the audience. They vote against Trump for other reasons, on other issues. Immigration is the issue that holds his coalition together, and the coalition is what the polls cannot measure.
There are signs the strategy has limits. Americans are more likely to disapprove than approve of how ICE enforces the law, and a majority rejects the most aggressive tactics. His overall approval rating has dropped over his time in office. But on immigration, the one issue where his own party is most loyal, the machine keeps running, because the machine was built for the base, and the base has not flinched.
The year ahead
The midterms are months away. The administration’s bet is that immigration delivers more than it costs, that the base’s enthusiasm outweighs the country’s unease, and that the ten deaths, the raids, and the steady stream of deportation flights will be remembered by those who wanted them, not by those who objected.
The AP-NORC poll suggests the bet is still on. Half the country says stop. The other half, or enough of it, says go on. A year in, the machine is still running, and nothing in the numbers says it will stop.
Source
- Al Jazeera: Most Americans say Trump has gone too far on US immigration: Poll
- AP News: Why immigration remains strong for Trump among Republicans, according to AP-NORC poll
- WFTV: Republicans rate Trump higher on immigration than on the economy or Iran, AP-NORC poll finds
- Pew Research Center: About half of Americans continue to say Trump administration is doing ‘too much’ on deportations