Election Note to Wall-Builders: Don't Bet On It

The border fence boondoggle, which recently enshrined in law an ill-considered proposal for a 700 mile fence on the U.S.-Mexico border, was supposed to have been an effort to save the necks of desperate politicians afraid of looking soft on immigration in hotly contested races. But those who are betting their political fortunes on that strategy should be prepared for an unpleasant surprise.

From Arizona to Oregon, illegal immigration is central to many races in next week's midterm elections, as well as to some candidates' national aspirations. The co-author of the border fence bill, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, is so convinced that his position on illegal immigration is right that he has declared his intent to seek the 2008 Republican nomination. Another dyed-in-the-wool restrictionist, Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, used his stance to build national name recognition and also has been said to be considering a 2008 run.

If past experiences with tough-guy immigration policies are any guide, however, it's clear that this kind of posturing may win very short-term political benefits, if at all.

In the mid-1990s, politicians responded with a package of restrictionist measures responding to polls showed an all-time high in Americans in favor of cutting back immigration. Once those policies were in place, however, public opinion swung dramatically in the opposite direction

In 1994, voters in a California referendum approved Proposition 187, the controversial law that would have denied government services to illegal immigrants had it not been struck down in court. In 1996, Congress passed laws that denied some government services to legal, tax paying immigrants, even as it imposed mandatory deportation policies and retroactive penalties for any past infractions of the law.

In the July 1993 -at the height of the sentiment that generated these policies--Gallup asked, "In your view, should immigration be kept at its present level, increased or decreased?" At the time 65 percent of those polled thought that immigration should be decreased, compared to 27 percent who thought it should stay the same and 6 percent who thought it should be increased. By the time of a 2000 Gallup Poll on the same question, however, the percentage who thought immigration should stay the same had risen to 41 percent and those who wanted to increase immigration more than doubled to 13 percent. Those who wanted to restrict immigration had fallen dramatically to 38 percent.

This suggests that all the recent grandstanding by the wall-builders is likely to backfire again. Indeed, more recent Gallup numbers on the same question show a sharp change just in the last few months. Between December 2005 and June 2006, the percentage of those polled (the question remained the same) who wanted to restrict immigration fell from 51 percent to 39 percent. At the same time, those wanting to keep immigration the same rose to 42 percent and those who wanted to increase it had risen to 17 percent.

The phrasing of the question framing immigration policy choices as more, less, or just-right obscures many of the complexities of the issues related to immigration. But it does provide a broad barometer of how likely Americans are to approve of punitive and enforcement-only measures as opposed to realistic, constructive approaches to one of the hottest issues of the day.

The increasingly favorable attitudes toward immigration coincided with ever-louder restrictionist rhetoric. In other words, the louder the tough guys yelled, the less Americans believed what they had to say.