It wasn’t groundbreaking that the speakers who took to the Republican National Convention stage Tuesday spent much of the night railing against President Joe Biden’s border and immigration policies. Biden was enabling a “border bloodbath,” crowd signs read, as congressional leaders accused Biden of enabling a border “invasion.”
Nor was it new to see them use provocative, inflammatory or extremist rhetoric to talk about immigrants and the Democratic incumbents. “Every day Americans are dying,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz thundered, “murdered, assaulted and raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released.”
What was clear is how the Republican Party has fine-tuned its anti-immigration message for the American electorate of 2024: focusing on drugs, human trafficking, crime and public disorder, and distinguishing between “illegal” immigrants who threaten the fabric of America and the right kind of migrant.
Kari Lake, the election-denying GOP Senate candidate from Arizona, summed it up early in the night: The goal of the GOP must be to “stop the Bidenvasion and build the wall.”
This all happened the night after Republican organizers tried to preach national unity in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and some speakers said they toned down their speeches.
But the Republican Party’s position on immigration might be more unifying than it looks. The data shows that Americans are much more against all kinds of immigration and more likely to favor more stringent border controls and immigration policies than when Trump ran for office the first or second time.
Indeed, the America of 2024 is more anti-immigrant than in the recent past, more skeptical of immigration and more open to policies that would have seemed extreme if they had been enacted when Trump was in office. This is in part because there really was an influx of migrants and a spike in border-crossing after Biden took office and as the pandemic wound down.
Since 2020, the share of Americans wanting the level of all immigration to decrease has shot up, from 28% in the middle of 2020 to 55% as of June, according to Gallup polling data.
Those analysts note that 2024 is the first time since 2005 that the majority of the American public has wanted less immigration and that this anti-immigration sentiment is at its highest point since 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
It’s not just white voters. Nonwhite voters and especially Latino voters are more likely than in the past to want less immigration, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rising across all partisan groups, including among Democrats.
Voters are much more positive on legal migration than illegal immigration. Overall, though, when thinking about the border and immigration, many Americans now seem to view the issue less as one about humanitarianism and human rights, and more through the lens of law and order, immigration researchers have observed.
This was reflected in the position many Republican rising stars, candidates and elected officials took on Tuesday night. Senate candidates, including Bernie Moreno of Ohio, Lake of Arizona, and Eric Hovde of Wisconsin, as well as former presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley, all talked about the benefits of legal immigration and the American dream while playing up fentanyl trafficking and drains on the American economy.
Moreno, himself a Colombian immigrant, emphasized that he and his parents immigrated to the U.S. “legally” — then attacked Biden and Democrats for “encourag[ing] millions of illegals to invade America.”
Other Republican leaders, such as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Speaker Mike Johnson, played up the threat of non-citizen voting changing the fabric of the nation, “harm[ing] citizens, drain[ing] resources, and disrupt[ing] elections,” as Johnson said.
The night’s closing message rounded out this critique of the status quo: “You can’t have a nation without borders.” It’s a simple pitch to those Americans who view migration as a question of order and process: upset at images of migrant caravans and river crossings, even if they don’t necessarily dislike the idea of extending the American dream.
In 2019, this strategic speech might not have resonated with most Americans. But in 2024, it’s ringing true to a growing share of the electorate.
Christian Paz is a senior politics reporter at Vox. Based in Washington, D.C., he covers the trends, issues and movements changing America’s political parties and American identity.
