Can Trump Take the Win on Immigration?
Can Trump Take the Win on Immigration?
Trump’s flirtation with amnesty threatens to obscure his biggest second-term policy victory.
One of the biggest success stories of President Donald Trump’s second term has been getting control of a border his successor-turned-predecessor willfully neglected for several years.
The number of migrants apprehended illegally crossing the southern border keeps hitting new lows. The release of illegal immigrants into the United States has been practically eliminated. Earlier this year, it appeared 1 million foreign workers had departed from the U.S. workforce since March. The Center for Immigration Studies has estimated that the number of illegal immigrants has dropped by a similar amount.
Trump was also able to get Congress to pass legislation funding immigration enforcement at extremely high levels without the kind of amnesty that has been included in most “comprehensive immigration reform” proposals for the past 20 years. This includes lots of money for ICE, which carries out interior deportations.
Yet Trump’s job approval numbers on immigration are down, despite doing more or less exactly what he promised to do during the 2024 campaign. (It should, however, be noted that second-term public polling on all things Trump-related is a bit of a mess and the results are all over the place.)
Other numbers suggest waning support for Trump’s tough immigration agenda, however. A Gallup poll released in mid-July found 30 percent wanted to reduce immigration, down from 55 percent in 2024. Still, only 26 percent want to increase immigration levels. But that is a big shift.
Trump may partially be a victim of his success. “With illegal immigration levels down dramatically and refugee programs suspended, the desire for less immigration has fallen among all party groups, but it is most pronounced among Republicans, down 40 percentage points over the past year to 48%,” Gallup’s Lydia Saad wrote in a summary of the poll’s findings. “Among independents, this sentiment is down 21 points to 30%, and among Democrats, down 12 points to 16%.”
Republicans are less worried about the border and Democrats, after briefly seeming to learn the lessons of last November, have once again become radicalized against meaningful immigration enforcement.
It may also be the case that Democratic poll respondents aren’t willing to give Trump any credit for his immigration-related accomplishments because they so despise his policies, especially on this issue.
Consider a July CBS News poll that found 56 percent disapproved of how Trump was handling immigration. The pollster asked respondents, “Do you think Donald Trump’s policies are making the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border go up, go down, or not change?” While 64 percent overall correctly say the crossings have gone down, 43 percent of Democrats said Trump’s policies had made no difference and another 10 percent believed they had made things worse at the border.
This means a majority of Democrats refused to acknowledge reality about what is going on at the border. This is why they tolerated the former President Joe Biden’s non-enforcement for so long, why most Democrats who ran against Biden in the 2020 primaries were to his left on immigration, and Democrats with 2028 ambitions are abandoning any previous feints toward moderation.
All this is happening as a handful of House Republicans have come out in favor of an amnesty bill. For years even before Trump, the House was where amnesty went to die because the GOP conference was dominated by conservatives opposed to immigration liberalization.
The individual provisions of these bills usually poll well until the opposition points out in a sustained way the number of illegal immigrants who would be involved, the weakness of the conditions for legalization, and the incentives for future illegal immigration. It’s unlikely that any such legislation could survive Trump seriously coming out against it.
But Trump is softer on illegal immigration that benefits employers of cheap labor than other subsets of this migration, and he can read the polls as well as anyone else. He has teased that there may be a way to triangulate on immigration and make everybody happy — except perhaps “serious radical right people.”
Trump seemed at the time to be workshopping the idea more than endorsing it. And while he has had a series of recent successes, he also had enough intra-MAGA battles within the past few months to raise questions about whether this is another fight worth picking with the base.
It’s another case of Trump needing to hold together his sometimes fractious coalition long enough for his policies to really work.
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