No one voted for anything

Or, why politics and policy are so disconnected when it comes to immigration

Everyone’s talking about the NYT article and debating the argument “we didn’t vote for this.” [Note: I realize after June 5, everyone’s also talking about the Musk/Trump feud. But I had to write this on Wednesday. - JRA] But we’re not talking enough about the specific words in the pull quote they used: “no one voted to deport moms.” That quote tells us quite a bit about the ideas that Americans bring to immigration discussions. The discussion about moral culpability for votes and the possibilities for analyzing what voters really want is valuable in some ways. But let’s not neglect the importance of the particular issue that sparked it.

The “moms” phrasing comes straight out of the Obama era, believe it or not. When announcing his deportation priorities, Obama talked about focusing on “felons, not families,” prompting critics to complain that this distinction was not so clear in practice. But it reflected a long-standing tendency among both parties to respond to contending frames and ways of understanding immigration. Because of all these competing considerations, the issue has tended to internal divide both parties, and mostly to fall below the radar as a national issue. All that changed in Obama-Trump years.

Immigration emerged as a key GOP issue during Obama’s presidency. This created an opportunity for Trump in both the Republican primary, and the general election, as Sides, Tesler and Vavrek show in their book Identity Crisis. Their title, like many works from around that era, includes an answer to the question: why did immigration become salient then? It became a big, topline issue long after the low point of the economic crisis and the unemployment it brought and the idea of immigrants “taking our jobs” hasn’t really even been a central point in Trumpist rhetoric. Instead, it’s been connected with crime and culture. And the conventional wisdom suggests that a variety of issues connected to identity – anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, sexism and homophobia, and anti-Latino sentiment were all mobilized during Obama’s presidency in various ways.

An alternative way of thinking about why immigration made its way onto the national agenda and stayed there is that it’s a very easy issue to manipulate. Evidence suggests that public opinion changes a lot based on exactly what’s being asked, with Trump’s immigration agenda enjoying some public support in the abstract but not on specifics.

One implication here is that this is an area in which policy and politics are most disconnected. Immigration ideas are driven by words that are symbolic to most Americans – “crisis at the border,” “invasion,” and visions of crime that are based on a few dramatic stories rather than statistics or most people’s lived realities. As a result, it’s probably much easier to rely on these distinctions – “moms” vs. frightening criminals, and to be surprised when the rhetoric of “mass deportations” turns into grim reality.

The possibilities for clarification are also troublingly limited. While people might be moved by stories about immigrants like Carol Hui, the person featured in the New York Times story, the issue itself is really complex, with multiple types of visas and statuses, all of them quite difficult to obtain. Common ideas like “immigrating the right way” or “waiting in line” don’t really map onto what’s actually going on for people. I’ve been contemplating the words of one of my colleagues, an expert in international migration: thinking about immigration using domestic US politics only will never make sense, because migration happens in a global context in response to global, transnational developments.

The moral question still matters, but looking at the specific issue brings it into different focus. Commentators so far have focused on the moral culpability of the voters, making important arguments about votes for white identity/supremacy and lack of empathy, as well as about the impossibility of ever knowing what exactly people are voting for. But surely the larger story here is the demagoguery and failure of civic leadership. And clearly, the story of this kind of populism and grievance politics – in which politicians stoke political sentiment that does not and cannot connect with any real policy solutions – is a dominant one of our political moment. Just because this kind of irresponsible behavior is ubiquitous doesn’t mean we should stop noticing it. People who vote to hurt their neighbors, and to think through the implications of their actions, are probably failing at the demands of citizenship. But politicians who demagogue about immigration, who accept light versions of demagogic frames, and who decline to connect citizen opinions to actual, workable policy solutions are certainly failing to live up to the demands of civic leadership.