Democrats must feel cursed.
Harry Enten of CNN did a deep dive into how legal immigrants view Democrats, Republicans, and illegal immigrants, and the news is very bad for the Democrats.
When asked, legal immigrant voters now trust Republicans more than Democrats on the issue of immigration–by a wide margin.
More than that, in just four years, they have shifted to the right by 40 points, meaning that Joe Biden’s open borders policies repelled exactly the people who Biden and the Democrats were trying to lock down as voters permanently in their camp.
No group has become more hawkish on immigration & shifted to the GOP than immigrants.
Immigrant voters
-Trust more on immigration in 2020: Dem +32 pt to Now: GOP +8 pt
-Net fav of immigrants here illegally: +23 pt in ’20, -6 pt in ’24
-Trump’s vote: 36% in ’16 to 47% in ’24! pic.twitter.com/YebaSvfL7D— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) June 10, 2025
You can’t make this up. It’s almost like everything the Democrats do has the opposite effect of what they intended. They persecuted Trump, tried to kick him off the ballot, accused him of being a Nazi, and all they did was help him get reelected to the presidency.
They opened the borders, sang the praises of illegal immigrants as the people who really built America and the future of our nation, and legal immigrants turned their backs on them in disgust.
They are the George Costanzas of politics.
In 2020, legal immigrants had warm feelings about illegal immigrants. That’s not hard to understand, really, given that legal immigrants saw in the people who risked it all to come to America for a better life as being rather similar to themselves, just unluckier.
But as illegal immigrants flooded into the United States, they didn’t see the people flowing in as mirror images of themselves, but as criminals and freeloaders who were giving all immigrants a bad name. This led to a nearly 30 point swing in opinion to the right, and a 40 point swing toward Republicans on the issue of immigration.
Funny that. Legal immigrants looked at MS 13 and Tren de Aragua and thought to themselves, “I left home because of these jerks, and now the Democrats invited them in to ruin the country.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when illegal immigrants were not seen as a particular threat. Sure, a lot of people wanted better border enforcement, but for the most part illegal immigrants kept their heads down, tried to work hard, avoided taking government services because, well, they didn’t want to get deported.
They were a fact of life in border communities, and relatively rare elsewhere. It’s not that people liked the border jumpers as an idea and politicians scored points by attacking illegal immigrants, but there was no mass movement to clear them out.
But then the floodgates opened, and Democrats started throwing money at illegal immigrants, setting up NGOs to usher them into the country, and Biden invited over 10 million into the country in one term.
And a lot of them were very bad people who didn’t want to work, and certainly weren’t inclined to obey the laws and keep their heads down.
As Democrats and the cultural elite turned illegal immigration into a top-tier cause, legal immigrants wanted nothing to do with this trend.
In October, ABC’s Martha Raddatz downplayed illegal alien Venezuelan gangs in an interview with JD Vance.
This week, we found out Tren de Aragua turned a Colorado apartment complex into a torture hub.
Vance was right and Raddatz should correct the record! pic.twitter.com/FcQvZO8AoB
— Christian Collins (@CollinsforTX) December 18, 2024
Who would want to be associated with that?
Not immigrants.
