What If It’s Democrats?

In his Washington Post column Jason Willick questions some prevailing wisdom about immigration policy:

In the early 2010s, as tea party Republicans bitterly clashed with President Barack Obama, political scientists and pundits popularized a comforting theory to explain America’s growing partisan divide. “Asymmetric polarization” held that while it might seem as though the parties were drifting apart simultaneously, that was an illusion: The Democratic Party was holding more or less steady while the GOP radicalized.

“We should be careful not to equate the two parties’ roles in contemporary political polarization: the data are clear that this is a Republican-led phenomenon,” wrote four political scientists in 2012.

It’s time to retire this conventional wisdom, which distorts debates about U.S. politics. The latest evidence comes from a study of immigration opinion in Public Opinion Quarterly, an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. Immigration has been perhaps the most polarizing issue of the past decade: It was the subject of Obama’s most boundary-pushing uses of executive authority and the key issue in Donald Trump’s outsider bid for the Republican nomination in 2016. Now border security is roiling Congress and could prove decisive in the 2024 election.

Partisan opinions on immigration have indeed polarized, as these events suggest. But it’s Democratic opinion that has driven the partisan divorce, as Trent Ollerenshaw of Duke University and Ashley Jardina of the University of Virginia show in their paper, “The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States.” They write: “Among Republicans, opinion on immigration has remained mostly stable” since the 1990s. Meanwhile, “the marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring.”

Americans’ average feelings toward immigrants who are in the country illegally, for example, “have grown warmer” since 1988 — from 37 out of 100 in 1988 to 42 in 2004 to 49 in 2020. But “these warming trends emerged only among Democrats,” the authors note, so that “the partisan divide in evaluations expanded from 8 points in 1988 to 28 points in 2020.”

This morning on one of the talking heads programs I heard Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker laying the blame for our immigration problems solidly on Republican intransigence. He, apparently, has never heard the expression “poisoning the well”. Democrats have supported what they refer to as “comprehensive immigration reform” and somehow their version of comprehensive immigration reform always includes the legalization of those already here illegally.

It’s not a coincidence that Republican views have remained stable since the 1990s. That was when it had become clear that Reagan era immigration reform which included what was then referred to as “amnesty” had not reduced illegal immigration and, if anything, had increased it. Gov. Pritzker has also, apparently, never heard of the idea of moral hazard.