The Republican emphasis on the border and immigration in the 2024 election is about more than migrant flows

Article after article covering the prominence of immigration and border security in the Republican campaigns for U.S. Senate and president in Texas have rightly noted the long-established salience of immigration and the border to Republican voters, and the central role of these issues in the “closing arguments” of GOP candidates at the top of the ballot in Texas, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

The enduring salience of immigration and border security to Republican voters in Texas is a necessary but not sufficient element for explaining the long persistence of these issues as a means of mobilizing Texas Republicans. It helps to make clear why candidates like Cruz (and virtually every competitive primary candidate in the March GOP primaries) continue following Trump in putting immigration and border issues front and center in their campaigns, while adopting his alarmist, often lurid tone.

But clear as this pattern is, it doesn’t explain why the issue maintains salience in the face of clear policy changes by the Biden administration, or the subsequent near-term decline in migrant traffic at the U.S.-Mexico border from historic highs in the last 11 months to the fewest encounters in the last four years. It can easily be made to seem like a puzzle: if the problem has been addressed and has abated, why is it still so important to Republican voters?

The easy answer is that they don’t trust Democratic candidates to solve the issue, or think the current situation is temporary. While this might explain this dynamic in the immediate run, it still begs the question of the consistency of Republican voters’ focus on the issue over the course of more than a decade.

Right up to Election Day, much of the coverage of the centrality of immigration and the border to GOP campaigns remains shy about trying to explain the persistent salience of the issue and the tone of Republican messages. Why is the issue so salient to Republican voters? Why have Republican candidates like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump so consistently responded to voters’ interest by embracing punitive policies, heightened enforcement, and even mass deportation programs after decades of Republican attempts to balance law-and-order approaches with a more moderate tone that reflects immigrants' role in American history or (at least) the American economy? And why has the national Democratic campaign moved toward a less draconian yet largely similar approach to the immigration and border issues based on increased enforcement and throttled-back legal immigration?

With the election upon us, the most recent University of Texas / Texas Politics Project Poll, conducted October 2-10 illustrates that the answer in 2024 is the same as it’s been over the last decade or more of constant attention to the the ebb and (especially the) flow of migrants at the border (as we previously wrote during the last election cycle): a majority of Texas Republican voters hold deeply negative views of immigrants. Large majorities support the immediate deportation of all undocumented immigrants, and also believe the U.S. admits too many legal immigrants into the country. A majority of Republican voters consistently state that Texas’ increasing ethnic diversity – a product in large part of the short- and long-term effects of immigration, as well as the state’s history – is a cause for concern rather than a cause for optimism.

While passing media attention to the vicissitudes of U.S. border policy may trigger more or less attention by voters to actual policy issues on the border, the more plausible source of the durable salience of immigration and border security in the political attitudes of Texas Republicans are their underlying beliefs about the negative attributes they ascribe to immigrants, and the perceived negative impact of immigration. The presence of significant minority-shares of Democrats who express similar attitudes add to Texas Republican politicians’ now-default modes of rhetoric and policy related to immigration and the border.

In the latest UT/TxPP poll, we asked a battery of questions assessing Texans’ beliefs about immigrants adopted from a national CBS News/You Gov Poll. The battery included a set of questions that ascribe positive or negative attributes to immigrants in general, and asks Texans’ whether they agree, disagree, or don’t hold an opinion about each of the statements (the CBS/YG survey did not include a “don’t know” option).

The overall partisan pattern in opinions finds Republican voters significantly more likely than both Democrats and independent voters to hold negative perceptions of immigrants writ large.  A majority of Republicans agree that:

• Immigrants are more likely to commit crimes (58%, versus 16% of Democrats and 27% of independents); 
• Immigrants “take jobs away from U.S. citizens” (64% of Republicans; 18% of Democrats, 31% of independents); 
• Immigrants are looking for handouts and welfare (69% of Republicans; 22% of Democrats, 31% of independents);
• Immigrants put a strain on local resources like emergency services and public schools (80% of Republicans; 31% of Democrats, 44% of independents).

It’s notable how each of these negative views dovetails with other GOP concerns, namely the economy, crime, and the size/efficiency of government, providing reinforcement for and through each set of issues — explaining the common tactic of GOP politicians tying more or less connected issues to attitudes about immigrants.

Yet there are cross-currents in Republican attitudes. Many Republican voters express positive attitudes about immigrants likely rooted in a combination of social norms valorizing the ideal of immigration in U.S. history and ethnic and racial diversity, as well as lingering coalition politics, that require Republicans, both as individuals and as a party, to reconcile these conflicting attitudes. So despite the presence of strongly negative beliefs about immigrants, non-trivial shares of Republicans also express positive beliefs about immigrants:

• Not quite half of Republicans (47%) agree that immigrants “are generally hard working people” (along with 86% of Democrats, 66% of independents);
• 47% also acknowledge that immigrants “fill jobs Americans won’t do” (along with 79% of Democrats, 67% of independents),
• Far fewer than half, 39%, agree that immigrants are “part of what makes America special” (compared to 80% of Democrats, 54% of independents).

Taken together, individual and group tensions in attitudes notwithstanding, negative considerations about immigrants’ impact on U.S. society predominate among Republican voters.

Given the negative valence of these underlying attitudes, over a decade of UT/TxPP polling results finding overwhelming agreement among Texas Republicans when asked if “undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States should be deported immediately?” are unsurprising.

While the Trump campaign’s call for mass deportations through the mobilization of military and police forces may strike some as fanciful, tone-deaf, or potentially destabilizing to the U.S. economy, these calls strike few GOP voters in Texas as problematic. When the UT/TxPP Poll started including the item on immediate deportations, the intent was to provide voters with an extreme policy option to test the extent of underlying attitudes toward what was essentially a hypothetical scenario. A decade later, it is essentially a question about one of the primary campaign planks of a major-party candidate.

In the two most recent instances in which this question was asked, Texas Republicans actually expressed their highest levels of support for mass deportations over the lifetime of the poll —  and their support is intense. Among the 85% of Republicans who said that they agreed with a policy of immediate, mass deportations in October polling, a majority of GOP voters, 59%, said that they “strongly agreed.” Since 2014, no fewer than 64% of Republican voters have agreed with the sentiment underlying a mass deportation program.

This intensity is important, and helps to explain why the focus of Republican officials, especially in Texas, remains so persistent: immigration and the border elicit strong reactions among both run-of-the-mill GOP voters as well as the intensely conservative voters who dominate GOP primaries, and thus set much of the state’s political agenda. Overall, 59% of Republicans strongly agree with the concept of immediate mass deportations, a nearly identical share as among those who identify as conservative (58%), along with overwhelming agreement, 82%, among those who identify as “extremely conservative.”

As we’ve noted before, this penchant for punitive policies and general nativism/anti-immigrant sentiment is not limited to undocumented/illegal immigration. Two-thirds (67%) of Republican voters in Texas say that the U.S. allows “too many” legal immigrants into the country, equal to the share of conservatives who say the same (66%), and barely trailing the 73% of extremely conservative voters who agree. 

The embrace of national policies that would both punish undocumented U.S. residents and limit legal immigration aligns with these underlying negative attitudes about immigrants. Recognizing the ensemble of these attitudes shreds the fig leaf of legalistic misdirection still occasionally dangled by Republican officials and voters to deflect characterizations of policies as anti-immigrant or otherwise nativist. There is little apparent space in this ensemble of attitudes consistent with bromides about immigration being welcome as long as those immigrants “follow the rules” and enter the United States “the right way” in response.

These broadly negative attitudes about immigrants and the impact of immigration are also evidenced in broad cultural assessments of shifting demographics in the state that are largely associated with outsiders of one stripe or another. No more than a third of GOP voters have said when asked over the last 5 years that the state’s “increasing racial and ethnic diversity” is a cause for optimism. October polling found fewer than one in four Republicans, 23%, saying they view the state’s increasing diversity with optimism, and the remaining plurality saying that the state’s changing make-up is either a cause for concern (40%), or simply declining to respond (36%).

Another incentive for Republican candidates and elected officials to hew to restrictive immigration policies and enforcement-based border strategies is that however alienating to left-leaning Democrats, a small but not trivial share of Democrats often support many of these policies, and also share some of the underlying beliefs:

• 31% of Democrats say that all undocumented immigrants should be deported immediately; 
• 31% believe that immigrants put a strain on local resources; 
• 29% see the state’s increasing diversity as a cause for concern; 
• 26% say that the country allows in too many legal immigrants.

Somewhat ironically, the often implicit suggestion that the salience of immigration and border security, and support for restrictive immigration and border policies, increases more or less in tandem with increased attention to surges in migrant flows or other evidence of policy failures at the border with Mexico, seems to more aptly describe shifts in Democrats’ attitudes rather than Republicans’. For example, the share of Democrats saying immigration or border security was the most important problem facing the state increased from 2% in June of 2022 to 14% in February of 2024, then decreased steadily to 7% in October 2024. This pattern in concern is reflected, with a lag, in U.S. Customs and Border Control data compiled by the Pew Research Center that show migrant encounters on the U.S.-Mexico border increased sharply in 2022 and 2023, peaking in December of the latter year, then dropping sharply through 2024.

And a similar pattern is evident in Texas Democrats’ attitudes toward mass deportation in roughly the same period, with support for immediate deportation of anyone in the country illegally increasing from 15% in February 2021 to a peak of 35% three years later (February 2024), and subsiding only somewhat to 27% in June and 31% in the recent October poll. While far from the shares of Republicans supporting the idea (which are more than twice as large at more than 80% in most of the same polls), these figures provide additional incentives for Republicans to double down on associated rhetoric and campaign promises.

The presence of these attitudes among a share of Democrats, setting aside where the baseline might be and how responsive to context their attitudes are compared to Republicans, provides even more incentive for Republican candidates to keep sounding the alarm on immigration issues in Texas while providing few reasons to moderate the kind of lurid rhetoric and previously beyond-the-pale policy proposals that Donald Trump rendered mainstream. Most Democrats may be appalled by Trump’s approach, but many are likely to find it less offensive than their more progressive fellow Democrats. These attitudes don’t appear to have generated crossover support for Trump or Cruz, but 11% of Democrats said they trusted Trump to do a better job than Harris on border and immigration issues, along with 7% who said they trusted neither, and 5% who didn’t have a view, even as Harris and the Biden administration have tacked to the right on these policies as the election year has unfolded. If Democratic voters’ attitudes have not propelled them into Trump’s camps, they have certainly helped to shift Democratic candidates’ positions and tempered their pushback on the Trump GOP’s more blunt positions.

This further liberates Republican candidates to continue passing on the proprieties of the previous generation of Texas Republicans who ascended to power led by figures like George W. Bush and Rick Perry. The preponderance of Republican base voters embrace attitudes that don’t require campaigns to use dog whistles now that the tune they are playing is the soundtrack for their campaigns – and a recurring theme of their policies.

The preponderance and intensity of anti-immigrant attitudes among Texas Republican voters will shape the coming cycle of the 2025 session and the 2026 elections no matter who wins the presidential or senate election. As we have written before, Donald Trump may have liberated these impulses among Republicans in Texas and nationwide, but they were powerful in Texas long before his takeover of the party. A Trump restoration would validate his approach and strengthen the Republicans in the legislature, the executive branch, and the consulting class aligned with his frank nativism either passively or actively (which accounts for virtually all of them, at least publicly and behaviorally). Should Harris win the White House, immigration and border issues will be central to Texas Republicans’ resistance to federal authority and the political fortunes of statewide leaders, as they have been during the Biden presidency and were during the Obama years (exhibit A: Greg Abbott). In either case, there should be no doubt about where Republican voters stand – or why.