Democrats Used to Worry About Immigration Too. What Happened?

While the partisan gap over immigration has been a defining feature of this campaign, its origins probably aren’t what you think. Yes, Donald Trump has stoked his core supporters in the Republican base into near-delirium with his talk of building a “great, great wall on our southern border.” But the immigration gap between the two parties owes much more to a less-remarked shift: Democrats today are far less concerned about legal and illegal immigration than they were two decades ago.

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ most recent survey on public opinion and foreign policy shows just how polarized attitudes have become. Whereas two-thirds of Republicans see “large numbers of immigrants and refugees coming into the United States” as a “critical threat,” only a quarter of Democrats feel the same way.