Opinion | The 'Third Rail of American Politics' Is Still Electrifying – The New York Times

Although public polling on immigration shows a strong shift to the left, survey responses in that vein mask a far more complicated reality. Over and over again, immigration has proved to be politically problematic for Democrats. As far back as 2007, when he was chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Rahm Emanuel warned that immigration had become the new “third rail of American politics.”

Mary C. Waters, a sociologist at Harvard whose work focuses “on the integration of immigrants and their children, the transition to adulthood for the children of immigrants, intergroup relations, and the measurement and meaning of racial and ethnic identity,” concisely described the immigration paradox in an email:

There is a large intensity difference. In 2020 support for immigration was the highest it’s ever been since 1965 when Gallup first asked the questions. But the people who are opposed to immigration are really opposed.

While those “who favor immigration favor a lot of other issues,” Waters continued,

those who are deeply opposed see immigration as an existential threat. As a national issue immigration motivates anti-immigrant voters in a single-minded way, but pro-immigration voters have a long list of things they support. In that way it works for the right.

Waters is chairman of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the integration of immigrants into American society. Americans, she points out,

are more open to immigration than either the left or the right assumes. But as soon as the issue is framed around race, it can become more polarized. I don’t think liberals understand that as well as they should.

The reality of the politics of immigration stands in contrast to the more positive Gallup findings that the percentage of people describing immigration as a “good thing” grew to 75 percent in 2021 from 52 percent in 2001, and the percentage describing it as a “bad thing” fell to 21 percent from 31 percent. Over the past 20 years, the percentage of voters who say immigration should be increased grew to 33 percent from 10 percent, while the share who said it should be decreased fell to 31 percent from 43 percent. The percentage saying immigration levels should be left unchanged remained relatively constant over these two decades, ranging from the mid-30s to the low 40s.

Despite these ostensible leftward trends, however, there is no question that immigration has become a worsening problem for President Biden and that surging illegal border crossings are weighing down his administration. “A record 1.7 million migrants from around the world, many of them fleeing pandemic-ravaged countries, were encountered trying to enter the United States illegally in the last 12 months, capping a year of chaos at the southern border,” two of my Times colleagues, Eileen Sullivan and Miriam Jordan, reported on Oct. 22.

The percentage of adults who disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration grew from 39 percent when he took office to 59 percent in late September, according to YouGov tracking surveys. The disappointing showing of Democrats up and down the ticket on Tuesday in Virginia, in Pennsylvania judicial races and in the closer-than-expected New Jersey governor’s race collectively signal substantial problems for Democrats going forward.

The predicament immigration poses goes well beyond politics. Roger Waldinger, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., described the broader implications in an email:

Immigration is an inescapable dilemma for all advanced economies: because they need immigrants; because the rewards for immigration are great (where one lives has a more important impact on income than what one does); and because development puts migration at reach for a growing segment of the world’s population.

As the Gallup world poll has repeatedly shown, Waldinger continued, “a very large share of the world’s population has an interest in migrating abroad,” especially to countries “where migration yields a very significant payoff.”

The incentives are not limited to economics:

In passing from poorer to richer countries the migrants also move to reasonably well functioning societies, where everyday security is taken for granted, the rule of law is observed, officials are generally not corrupt, bureaucracies function in predictable ways, elections are generally honest, and the country’s economic wealth allows for investment in public goods and the maintenance of a safety net that compensate for the material shortcomings of the deprived, even if in ways that fall greatly short of the potential or the desirable.

All of these factors, Waldinger added, “are compounded by the effects of climate change and the political insecurities that are driving displacement worldwide.”

These forces, in turn, work to the advantage of the political right, Waldinger continued, and “unfortunately for the left, I don’t see how it can altogether avoid immigration.”

Waldinger notes:

Many international events, all beyond the control of U.S. presidents or politicians, bring immigration questions to the fore, whether having to do with epidemics (e.g., Zika, Ebola and now Covid), terrorist attacks abroad (the killings in Paris), the Syrian civil war and now the fall of the U.S. regime in Afghanistan. No U.S. president or politician can prevent desperate migrants from suddenly massing at a bridge at Del Rio. When such events happen under a Democratic president (as happened with the unaccompanied-minor surge under Obama) they are good for the right, but terrible for the left, since the governmental response is inevitably and necessarily far less generous than the humanitarian/cosmopolitan left would prefer.

At the same time, Waldinger argues, there is a hidden

universal consensus over the fundamental goals of immigration policy — namely, that migration should be controlled, not open, and that states rightly exclude the many people who would benefit from migration and select those that the citizens prefer. That consensus, which is shared by majorities across the world, is hidden as a result of differences over what are the details of policy, namely, just how many people should be admitted and by what criteria should immigrants be selected.

The United States, more than any other nation, cannot avoid the conflicts and disputes provoked by immigration. This country not only has the most immigrants of any country in the world but also is the first-choice destination of most potential immigrants and, possibly most confounding, it has become inextricably dependent on foreign-born workers to perform essential tasks.

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics published data in the May 2021 bulletin establishing that

Foreign-born workers were more likely than native-born workers to be employed in service occupations; natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations; and production, transportation and material-moving occupations.

The bureau reported that significantly higher percentages of foreign-born than native-born workers are employed in health care, food preparation, farming, construction and extraction occupations.

A Nov. 12, 2019, headline in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel captured the situation succinctly: “Wisconsin’s dairy industry would collapse without the work of Latino immigrants — many of them undocumented.”

Evidence of the dependence on immigrant workers became glaringly apparent during the Covid pandemic.

An April 2020 study, “Immigrant Workers: Vital to the U.S. Covid-19 Response, Disproportionately Vulnerable,” released by the Migration Policy Institute stated:

While the foreign born represented 17 percent of the 156 million civilians working in 2018, they accounted for larger shares in some frontline occupations: 29 percent of physicians, 38 percent of home health aides and 23 percent of retail-store pharmacists.

A December 2020 study, “Immigrant Essential Workers Are Crucial to America’s Covid-19 Recovery,” put together by the pro-immigrant group Fwd.us, showed that

immigrants represent a substantial, and thus critical, part of America’s essential Covid-19 work force combating the pandemic. Numbering nearly 23 million people, these medical, agricultural, food service and other immigrant essential workers make up nearly 1 in 5 individuals in the total U.S. essential work force.

René D. Flores, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago who studies American attitudes toward immigration, offered further insights. In response to my inquiry, he wrote by email that in survey and focus group research, he and his colleagues have observed that “just mentioning the term ‘immigrants’ is a negative prime among U.S. individuals. It leads them to express more restrictionist views.”

Compounding the problem for pro-immigration Democrats, Flores wrote, is that “exposing U.S. individuals to positive messages about immigration has no effect on their policy attitudes” because when “individuals read negative messages on immigrants, they become motivated to express restrictionist views, particularly conservative and low-educated individuals.”

Democrats, Flores said, carry “a bigger burden” in the debate over immigration:

Due to the pervasive negative stereotypes of undocumented immigrants, they must try to redefine who these immigrants are perceived to be. That’s why they rely on stories of exceptional immigrants to try to change the narrative, but this is hard given people’s automatic associations. You basically must change these deep-seated cultural representations of perceiving immigrants as a threat and as undeserving. There’s mixed evidence of whether providing individuals with accurate information can shape their views.

In a recently presented paper, “The American Immigration Disagreement: How Whites’ Diverse Perceptions of Immigrants Shape Their Attitudes,” Flores and Ariel Azar, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Chicago, found that white people’s attitudes toward immigrants could be broken up into “five main classes or ‘immigrant archetypes’ that come to whites’ minds when they respond to questions about immigrants in surveys.”

The authors, describing in broad outline the various images of immigrants held by whites, gave the five archetypes names: “the undocumented Latino man” (38 percent), the “poor, nonwhite immigrant” (18.5 percent), the “high status worker” (17 percent), the “documented Latina worker” (15 percent) and the “rainbow undocumented immigrant” (12 percent).

Two groups elicit the highest levels of opposition to immigration, the authors write:

We find the “undocumented Latino man” archetype is predicted to increase the probability of wanting to decrease immigration flows by a whopping 38 points, plus or minus 7 points. This archetype is joined near the bottom by the “rainbow undocumented immigrant” — “from every region in the world” — which increases that probability by 29 points.

The authors identify the survey respondents who are most resistant to immigration:

These respondents are the oldest of any class and possess many of the traits typical of conservative Southern whites. Many live in small towns or rural areas in the U.S. South and identify as Republicans. Further, many of them are retirees with low levels of education. Interestingly, these respondents live in the least diverse communities relative to all other classes as judged by the presence of few immigrants and ethnic/racial minorities in their ZIP codes, which highlights the subjective nature of immigrant archetypes.

A coming paper in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “Intervening in Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: The Causal Effects of Factual Information on Attitudes Toward Immigration,” by Maria Abascal, Tiffany J. Huang and Van C. Tran, sociologists at N.Y.U., the University of Pennsylvania and CUNY, reveals an additional hurdle facing pro-immigration Democrats.

The authors conducted a survey in which they explicitly provided information rebutting negative stereotypes of immigrants’ impact on crime, tax burdens and employment. They found that respondents in many cases shifted their views of immigrants from more negative to more positive assessments.

But shifts in a liberal direction on policies were short-lived, at best: “In sum,” the authors wrote, the effects of the stereotype-challenging information “on beliefs about immigration are more durable than the effects on immigration policy preferences, which themselves decay rapidly. These findings recommend caution when deploying factual information to change attitudes toward immigration policy.”

The conservative shift to the right on immigration policy raises another question. The Republican Party was once the party of big business and the party that supported immigration as a source of cheap labor. What happened to turn it into the anti- immigration party?

Margaret E. Peters, a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and the author of the 2017 book “Trading Barriers: Immigration and the Remaking of Globalization,” argues that corporate America’s need for cheap labor had been falling before the advent of Trump and that that decline opened to door for Republican politicians to campaign on anti-immigrant themes.

In a March 2020 paper, “Integration and Disintegration: Trade and Labor Market Integration,” Peters succinctly describes the process:

The decision to remove barriers to trade in goods and capital flows have had profound effects on immigration. Trade has meant the closure of businesses in developed countries that rely on low-skill labor. When these firms closed, they took their support for low-skill immigration with them. The ability of capital to move intensified this trend: Whereas once firms needed to bring labor to their capital, they can now take their capital to labor. Once these firms move, they have little incentive to fight for immigration at home. Finally, increased productivity, as both a product of and response to globalization, has meant that firms can do more with fewer workers, again decreasing demands for immigration. Together, these changes have led to less business support for immigration, allowing politicians to move to the right on immigration and pass restrictions to appease anti-immigration forces.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats, in the view of Douglas Massey, a sociologist at Princeton, have failed to counter Republican opposition to immigration with an aggressive assertion of the historical narrative of the United States

as a nation of immigrants, tapping into the fact that nearly all Americans are descendant from immigrants who arrived into a land they did not originally populate, and that despite epochs of xenophobia and restriction, in the end the U.S. has been a great machine of immigrant integration that has benefited the United States and made us an exceptional nation.

Unfortunately, Massey continued,

the intertwined forces of climate change, state failure, violence and criminal economics will greatly complicate efforts to create a counternarrative by producing surges of asylum seekers and refugees, which could be managed with effective immigration and border policies, but which under current circumstances instead serves to produce images of chaos along the southern border.

Ryan Enos, a professor of government at Harvard, has a different perspective. He argues that

until Trump campaigned on his Muslim ban and his largely symbolic issue of the border wall, there was mostly a consensus among Republican and Democratic politicians allowing for a continued welcoming of immigrants into the United States and keeping reactionary anti-immigrant politics off the table. There was also largely a consensus among most Democratic and Republican voters supporting this.

This consensus, Enos contends, still holds, but it is fragile:

The question for the future of the broader consensus on immigration is whether Republicans can continue to be successful despite the anti-immigrant pandering that is largely out of step with the broad American consensus on immigration. If they are electorally successful — and there is reason to believe they will be, given forecasts for Democratic losses in 2022 — then this broad consensus might break down permanently and a large portion of the American public may follow their Republican leaders toward more fully adopting anti-immigrant ideology.

As Democrats have continued to struggle to reach agreement on major infrastructure and social-spending bills, they have been forced to rapidly shift gears on tax hikes without fully addressing potential unintended consequences. Party members remain tentative, at best, in their willingness to challenge the Senate filibuster rule, and senior House Democrats are retiring in an early warning signal that the party may face severe losses in November 2022.

There are potentially tragic consequences if the Democratic Party proves unable to prevent anti-immigration forces from returning to take over the debate, consequences described by U.C.L.A.’s Waldinger:

The average undocumented immigrant has been in the U.S. for 10 years. The problems of the undocumented spill over onto the large population of U.S. citizens, who are the children, mates, relatives of the undocumented and whose lives are adversely affected by the increasingly repressive policy environment.

Put differently, Waldinger continued, “the ever-greater embeddedness of the unauthorized population increases the legitimacy of their claims.”

In other words, for all intents and purposes, most undocumented immigrants — and perhaps especially the Dreamers — are Americans deserving of full citizenship. But these Americans are on the political chopping block, dependent on a weakened Democratic Party to protect them from a renewal of the savagery an intensely motivated Republican Party has on its agenda.

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