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Trump’s Deportations Make Americans Pro-immigrant Again

Gallup documents how the ICE raids have backfired, while another new study shows the limits of unions’ power of persuasion.

All President Trump had to do to completely discredit his war on immigrants in the eyes of the American public was to wage it. Once our citizens realized it would mean the disruption of law-abiding families and communities, as well as the decimation of nontrivial economic sectors like food cultivation and processing, they turned against it in record numbers.

In the words of the press release that accompanied the Gallup poll released last Friday, “a record-high 79 percent of U.S. adults say immigration is a good thing for the country.” Despite years of Goebbels-esque xenophobic and Great Replacement propaganda from right-wing social media, the Murdoch network, and MAGA politicos, nothing has propelled Americans into a pro-immigrant posture like Stephen Miller’s orgy of deportations. Last year, Gallup found that fully 55 percent of Americans wanted immigration to our nation reduced. This year, in polling conducted over the month of June, when Miller’s masked troopers were visibly snatching Latinos from bus stops and swap meets, that percentage toppled to just 30 percent. From 2024 to 2025, the percentage of Republicans who think immigration is good for the country rose from 39 percent to 64 percent.

What the deportations have done is put a human face on immigrants, while putting a dehumanized, masked face on ICE agents. Clearly, Miller’s festering hatreds eclipsed any concern he might have had for optics, much less any appreciation of the public’s capacity for rudimentary decency.

Support for allowing law-abiding, tax-paying undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship has risen to 78 percent; among Republicans, it’s risen to 59 percent. Asked their views on Trump’s handling of the immigration issue—most visibly, his deportations—62 percent of the public disapprove (45 percent strongly disapprove), while just 35 percent approve.

In its polling, Gallup oversampled Hispanics, finding that while they overwhelmingly (91 percent) favored giving law-abiding undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship, 39 percent of them favored decreasing the level of immigration to the U.S., while among all Americans, only 30 percent favored decreasing immigration levels. That speaks to the fact that while Hispanics overwhelmingly oppose Trump’s mass deportations, many find themselves in the same occupations—say, residential construction—as new immigrants, and know from experience that employers hire new arrivals to bring down wage levels for their entire workforce. This shouldn’t come as a revelation; economists at Cal State Northridge documented this effect in the mid-1990s.

THE COMPLEXITIES OF WORKING-CLASS POLITICS were further illuminated today when a breakdown of union-member voting in the 2024 election was released by the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP). Like other studies that have already appeared, it shows that union members backed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a small, if significant, margin. Unlike its predecessors, however, by analyzing the data in the rigorous Cooperative Election Study of the 2024 election, it was able to detail the fissures within the union vote.

Back in prehistoric times (1986), I wrote a piece for The Nation noting that union members had been voting for Democrats in presidential elections at a rate about nine percentage points higher than the public at large, and 12 percentage points higher than their non-union counterparts, since the 1960s. My point was to urge Democrats to do what they could to reform labor law so that unions, which then represented about 17 percent of the workforce (half the rate of their high point in the 1950s), could grow again, which would be to the Democrats’ electoral advantage.

Despite repeated efforts to do that, Democrats could never get the 60 Senate votes necessary to pass such a law, and today the rate of unionization stands at just under 10 percent, and just under 6 percent among private-sector employees. Despite the continued shrinkage of union membership and political presence and clout, however, labor’s remaining members still vote more Democratic than their non-union peers. The CAP study shows their support for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump last year was 8.2 percent higher than that of non-union Americans. But like the electorate at large, the union vote was very different for women than it was for men, and for college graduates than it was for working-class members. While working-class women who belonged to unions voted for Harris at a rate 14.1 percentage points higher than working-class women who were not union members, working-class men who belonged to unions voted for Trump at a rate 2.2 percentage points higher than working-class men who did not belong to unions—and this trend was most pronounced among male working-class members under 30.

Despite this lackluster performance among the labor movement’s working-class men, the 8.2 percentage point margin by which Harris led Trump is almost twice the margin by which Hillary Clinton led Trump in 2016. CAP’s analysis makes clear that this gain is largely due to female union members, both working-class and college graduates, backing Harris with a percentage point margin over their non-union peers more than twice the rate that Clinton had eight years before.

CAP doesn’t have data that breaks down the vote within individual unions, but as I’ve noted previously, the total number of members in the two national teachers unions—the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association—comes to roughly five million, which is about one-third of the number of America’s union members. That Democrats still carry the union vote, I believe, is primarily due to unionized teachers and unionized nurses (whose numbers continue to grow), and secondarily to unionized working-class women whose appreciation of safety-net provisions and reproductive rights exceeds that of their male counterparts. The kinds of cross-pressures on working-class men, so authoritatively described in Theda Skocpol’s and Lainey Newman’s study of Pennsylvania steelworkers, Rust Belt Union Blues, don’t affect women and non-blue-collar union members nearly as much.

The 180 in public opinion on immigrants makes clear that for all our fissures, some developments still register sufficiently to create the occasional sea change. But the CAP breakdown of the union vote makes clear just how much those differences still matter.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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