Follow this authorJason Willick's opinions
FollowThe divergence is even starker on the question of whether immigrants take Americans’ jobs. In 2004, just 14 percent of Republicans and Democrats said immigrants were “not at all likely” to take Americans’ jobs. In 2020, the figure among Republicans was roughly the same — 16 percent — while for Democrats it soared to 53 percent.
Advertisement
A similar pattern holds for immigration levels: In 1994, just 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans on both sides wanted immigration levels to increase. They drifted apart gradually in the 2000s and suddenly in the 2010s. In 2022, 41 percent of Democrats, compared with 10 percent of Republicans, supported higher immigration levels. (These figures, which Ollerenshaw sent me, come from General Social Survey data released after the article was written.)
On the question of legal status for people in the United States illegally, Republican opinion has liberalized significantly, albeit not as fast as Democratic opinion. Only 20 percent of Republicans supported “amnesty programs for law-abiding illegal immigrants” in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, compared with 44 percent in 2022, the second year of the Biden administration. For Democrats, the percentage increased from 58 percent to 88 percent over the same period.
The trend toward divergence between the parties isn’t inexorable: Democrats’ opposition to more border patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border declined from a high of 74 percent during the first year of Trump’s presidency to 49 percent in 2022.
Advertisement
In some cases, polarization has been more or less “symmetric” — for example, while the share of Democrats who think immigrants strengthen America rose by 18 percentage points between 2010 and 2021, it declined by 13 among Republicans. But the overall story of public opinion on immigration is more or less the opposite of what conventional asymmetric polarization theory would suggest: Instead of Democratic stability and a Republican shift rightward, the data show Republican stability and a Democratic shift leftward.
Journalist Kevin Drum has documented how opinion trends on abortion, same-sex marriage, guns, religion and taxes also don’t match the narrative of Republican radicalization as the driving force in the culture wars. And a 2019 New York Times analysis of party platforms showed that in both 2012 and 2016, the Democratic platform moved sharply to the left. The Republican platform, by contrast, moved modestly to the right in 2012, and modestly toward the center in 2016.
To be fair to the tea-party-era popularizers of asymmetric polarization theory, the Democrats’ progressive evolution wasn’t as pronounced a decade ago as it is today. And the fact that........