Trump’s immigration views out of step
Americans’ attitudes toward immigrants are not what you might think. Unlike their president, Americans have generous views about immigration.
The Trump administration has moved on dark campaign promises. President Trump has stepped up immigration enforcement, is still pushing for a wall, wants to shrink the legal immigrant population, pardoned former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, has upended Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and is making the travel ban permanent.
But as Trump makes life miserable for immigrant communities and the people connected to them, he’s acting in contradiction to how Americans view these issues. I don’t mean the protesters out in the streets. I mean everyday Americans living life beside immigrants all across the country, including in Silicon Valley.
Polling on immigration is clear. A large share of Americans support allowing the “Dreamers” to stay in the country legally — 87 percent, according to a recent CBS News Poll. An NBC/ Survey Monkey poll found that 71 percent think that immigrants in general living in the U.S. without authorization ought to have a chance to legalize, a view that Americans have held for years. In some polls, even a majority of Republicans feel that way.
As for deportations, a large majority of Americans have views that are out of step with the administration’s policy. In a CNN/ORC poll, 71 percent of Americans believe that the government should not try to deport all unauthorized immigrants.
What about the wall? A CBS News poll shows that more than 6 in 10 Americans oppose it.
The same is true of the original travel ban, though a slimmer majority of registered voters express opposition.
And unlike Trump, Americans on the whole don’t want to shrink the legal immigrant population. According to Gallup, 62 percent want the immigration rate to increase or stay the same.
Now, the usual partisan divide shows up on this issue, with Republicans favoring harsher immigration policies and Democrats expressing more accommodating views. That said, Americans are generally not that concerned about immigration — only 11 percent thinks it’s the nation’s most important problem. And the balance of American opinion tilts toward accommodation.
Why do Americans appear comfortable with their immigrant neighbors? The immigrant population, including the undocumented, is more settled. Their children and even grandchildren assimilate in ways that look a lot like historical assimilation patterns. Across the generations, there is an increase in education, income, neighborhood integration, political participation and intermarriage, and virtually all the children of immigrants speak English.
As immigrant groups assimilate, Americans are making their own adjustments, including coming to softer views about immigration. My research team and I did a deep dive to see how that plays out. We spent hours upon hours talking to almost 200 people in Silicon Valley. They are established residents — U.S.-born citizens of U.S.born parents — in a place where more than half of the population is a diverse set of immigrants or the children of immigrants, and where 7 percent of the total population is undocumented immigrants. We spoke to people from a range of class, racial and age backgrounds. They told us in detail about their experiences living with first- and second-generation immigrants as neighbors, co-workers, schoolmates, spouses and extended family members.
We found that the assimilation that immigrants experience — that sense of gaining new opportunities and losing some traditions — was mirrored in the established individuals who live among so many foreign-born people.
Even in California, this bluest of states, the people we spoke to struggled with their views of unauthorized immigrants. In the abstract, they didn’t like that there were so many. But the experience of the undocumented is braided into daily life, leading the people we interviewed to reject mass deportations. An upper-middle-class college student understood “that you can’t let every single person into the country.” But the fact that his childhood friend overstayed his visa, and the parents of his closest friend, whom he met at college, are undocumented led him to conclude that sending everyone back “is just wrong.”
They thought immigrants had to speak English if they wanted to be American. And yet they saw value in speaking more than one language. The large immigrant population could make established residents sometimes feel like strangers in their own land. But they also saw benefit in the diversity that immigrants bring. An African American home health care aide told us, “there would be more togetherness” without immigration, but noted “on the other hand, we would miss a lot of learning experience — that we have learned how to get along.” On this score, Silicon Valley is in tune with what’s going on in the rest of the country. Immigrants and established populations are figuring out how to get along across the nation — even in the reddest of places.
This is cold comfort to immigrants whose livelihood is threatened by Trump’s policies. And his rhetoric and actions inflame a dangerous anti-immigrant backlash among a hard right that shares his vision. But this much is clear: The noise the president is making on immigration doesn’t speak for America. Not even close.