In September 2017, an ABC News/Washington Post poll asked "Before (Donald) Trump became president, do you think the US was too tough in enforcing immigration laws, not tough enough or was enforcement about right?" and then "How about now, under (Donald) Trump, do you think the US is too tough in enforcing immigration laws, not tough enough or is enforcement about right?" The results:
Before Now
Too tough 6% 45%
About right 44% 30%
Not enough 49% 22%
People clearly saw Trump as having made enforcement tougher, and appear to have been about equally divided on whether that was a good thing: slightly over half (52%) said that things were either about right or still not tough enough; 50% said that things had been about right or too tough. Of course, the assessment of "before Trump" might have been influenced by experience under Trump. In 2004, there was a very similar question: " How do you rate the federal government on immigration? Is it too tough, not tough enough, or about right?" 10% said too tough, 61% not tough enough, and 26% about right. That's considerably less favorable than the 2017 "before Trump" assessment, but opinions could have changed quite a bit in the 10+ years before Trump was elected. The most similar question I could find in those years was in 2013, when another ABC News/Washington Post Poll asked "Overall, do you support or oppose...stricter border control to try to reduce illegal immigration? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?" 63% said support strongly, 17% support somewhat, and 10% oppose somewhat and 7% oppose strongly. Despite the difference in the questions, it seems reasonable to take the "strongly support stricter controls" as roughly equivalent to "not tough enough." So as I suggested in my last post, a solid majority supported tougher enforcement in principle before the rise of Trump; after getting it, support fell, either because of what people saw and heard about the effects of the policy, or because the policy was associated with Trump. But with about 50% support, it was (as of Sept 2017) still more popular than Trump was overall. A lot has happened since that time, but I can't find any comparable survey questions. My guess is that opinions have not changed much, since general opinions about Trump have been very stable.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
Sorry to be grumpy here, but you haven't done your homework. In particular, how has actual immigration policy changed? How many people were deported per month over the Obama years, and how did that number change with Trump?
ReplyDelete(OK, this isn't quite as necessary here as it would be were the results less stark. Still, it'd be nice to show opinions changing in the face of way less actual policy change than is claimed or thought.)
(Ouch, I was able to determine that Obama deported about 2 million people, but there ought to be a nice graph out there somewhere, but I ran out of energy before I found it. Sheesh, social science is hard work. One analysis I remember reading is that Trump has the problem that Obama's aggressiveness on deporting illegal aliens who also had criminal records means that it's hard to increase deportation numbers without going after people who are just working.)
As an older "we're right, they're wrong" Democrat, I'm not enthused about the new lefties trying to take over the Democratic Party: we've been busting our butts for the exact same goals for the last 60 (or more) years. Get off my lawn. But as a real thing, we have been overly sensitive to criticism from the right, so it turns out that, for example, Dems are way better than Repugs on holding down increases in the deficit*. And avoiding being weak on illegal immigration is something we may have put way to much effort into over the years. Maybe the kids aren't all bad. (I hope this isn't too random: I think I have a valid and relevant point here.)
*: Science magazine was freaking out when Trump was elected that science budgets would be cut. But science got some juicy increases. My take: it's pork: everyone wants that spending in their state.