Andrew Gelman recently reposted something I wrote on immigration in 2016. That reminded me that I should update another old post on immigration, which summarized answers to a question on whether immigration should be "kept at its present level, increased, or decreased." Opinion had shifted towards "decreased" until the mid-1990s, but steadily moved towards "increased" after that. As of 2016, "decreased" was still more common than "increased," but it was getting close. Here is the updated figure:
In 2020, the balance was on the side of increased for the first time (34% increased, 36% present level, 28% decreased), but that was followed by four years of shifts against immigration, so opinions are now about where they were in 2002-4.
On some issues, opinions shift with party control of the presidency. Sometimes there is a general "thermostatic" movement against the administration's policy, or what people perceive as its policy: when a Democrat is in office, people shift away from support for spending on social programs; when a Republican is in office, they shift towards more support. There's no sign of that here. Sometimes there are shifts that differ by party: people see conditions as worse when the other party is in power. That is, a Republican might think that levels of immigration were OK under Trump but out of control under Biden, and shift from "present level" to "decreased." I got the breakdowns by party for some of the recent surveys:
People of all parties have generally moved in the same direction at the same time. There was a substantial increase in the gap between parties in 2014-19, but only a slight increase since then. To put things in another way, during Biden's term both Democrats and Republicans moved towards saying that immigration should be decreased, and the movement was only slightly larger among Republicans. That leads to a question of what they were reacting to. Most people don't have much personal experience that would help them in judging levels of immigration; but to the extent that views reflect news coverage, you'd expect growing divergence based on differences in coverage between mainstream and conservative media.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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