Public Attitudes Toward Immigration: Was There a Trump Effect?

Abstract

This paper examines public opinion about immigration policy in 2012 and 2016, seeking to understand whether there are meaningful differences in public opinion across these elections, whether the predictors of opinion changed, and whether the issue’s salience grew. One prominent candidate for explaining differences in opinion about immigration in 2016 is the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, whose presidential candidacy was launched with an attack on immigration from Mexico. We analyze content from Trump’s campaign speeches and from Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign speeches to compare the emphasis on immigration themes, finding that Trump talked far more about immigration than Romney did. We also examine media coverage and find a marked increase in mentions of the immigration issue, which should, in theory, lead to more people seeing immigration as an important problem. We analyze “most important problem” questions from American National Election Studies surveys and find that mentions of immigration increased from less than one percent in 2012 to about five percent in 2016. However, we find that the overall distribution of public opinion about immigration changed very little from 2012 to 2016. Multivariate models show that the predictors of opinion about immigration policies were primarily the same in 2016 as in 2012: a combination of perceived economic threat, perceived cultural threat, and ethnic prejudice. In addition, models of presidential vote choice find that immigration issues were statistically significant predictors in 2016 but not in 2012. All of this suggests that Trump’s 2016 candidacy did not persuade so much as it activated. Trump’s rhetoric did not significantly alter American public opinion on immigration. Still, his emphasis on the immigration issue did garner increased media coverage and was attractive to many Republican and conservative voters who already held anti-immigration views.