How do voters think about immigration? It is an important question, and one that seems particularly apt ahead of next week’s U.S. national elections.

Donald Trump, of course, built his successful 2016 campaign in large part around the promise to remake the U.S. immigration system to be more restrictive. Political science research suggests this focus was crucial in his ability to attract certain kinds of voters. A study published in Public Opinion Quarterly found that among White voters who did not vote Republican in 2012 but switched to Trump in 2016, attitudes on race and immigration were more important than economic factors. This cut against conventional explanations that native-born voters’ concerns about immigration are related to fears about competition for jobs. Other research has found that Trump was propelled by these voters’ concerns about losing their status as a dominant group and anxieties about residing in areas with growing numbers of Latino residents.

All the more intriguing, then, that the issue has been all but absent from the current election. In 2016, immigration was the fourth most mentioned issue in the Trump campaign’s television ads, according to The Wall Street Journal. This year, it barely cracked the top ten. Meanwhile Biden, who is ahead in virtually all national polls and leading in several swing states, has hardly raised the issue at all.

The explanation may come down to the notion of salience, which describes why voters believe some issues to be more important than others. While anxieties about race, immigration, and demographic change have been a longstanding undercurrent of U.S. politics, they were brought to the fore in 2016 much more than in 2020. It seems reasonable to assume that the COVID-19 pandemic and the sharp economic and labor market dislocations it caused have been more pressing concerns for many people.

Significant research from Europe demonstrates the difference between an individual voter’s opinion on a given policy and the importance he or she attaches to that issue in relation to others. Research from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany found that voting behavior differed in response to changes in immigration policy that increase “salience and visibility of the issue.” Prominent media coverage also plays a part in this process, by highlighting particular “focus events” and raising the profile of particular individuals.

Most scholarship on how immigration affects political attitudes has focused on North America and Western Europe, but there has been some research elsewhere, including in newer democracies. In the Dominican Republic, voters in areas with higher concentrations of Haitian immigrants were driven by notions of political and cultural identity and competition to disproportionately support right-wing, anti-immigration politicians. Analysis of data from 11 sub-Saharan African countries, meanwhile, found that opposition to immigration was higher around the time of the election and in countries that were more democratic and had dominant party systems.

Voters’ reactions to immigration, then, are malleable. They can be shaped by a range of factors, including their own perceptions of demographic change and how politicians seize on those perceptions. In other words, public attitudes towards immigration may not always drive elections. But under the right circumstances, the issue can be decisive.

Best regards,
Julian Hattem
Editor, Migration Information Source
[email protected]