The Best Political Argument for More Immigration Restrictions Just Failed

Alex Nowrasteh

My colleagues and I have spent much time addressing the arguments raised by those who favor further restricting legal immigration to the United States. Our research on terrorism, crime, economic, fiscal, welfare consumption, and culture addresses specific arguments against liberalized immigration. All those fit into our bigger strategy based on theories of why people are opposed to immigration. They are the understandable fear of border and immigration chaos, security concerns, and the untrue belief that the legal immigration system isn’t restrictive. Those concerns all explain much of the sharp move in public opinion toward immigration restrictionism in the run-up to the 2024 election that many of us saw rising years ago.

The issues above matter to voters, intellectuals, and policymakers—but one enormous issue was always more important to politicians who actually make policy: politics. Many Republican politicians and their supporters are worried about immigrants and their descendants being permanent Democratic voters and that more legal immigration would usher in generations of Democratic Party dominance. “Demographics is (political) destiny,” restrictionists would say while invoking mythology about the Immigration Act of 1965 being a Kennedy conspiracy to change America (it wasn’t, just the opposite) and gesturing toward voting patterns by nativity, ethnicity, or race. The cruder and less common version of this is the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, and many left-wing partisans did all they could to stoke it with confident predictions of demographic change caused by immigration turning the entire country into California. In essence, it was a reverse Curley Effect that wasn’t a crazy conspiracy theory and that resonated with the self-interest of politicians who thought immigrants and their descendants would vote Democratic for all time.

In 2020, political data scientist David Shor told us that demographic trends were failing to lead to the promised Democratic dominance, but people didn’t pay much attention to him, and exaggerated fears of noncitizen voting were a consistent Republican claim during the 2024 election. Now, nobody can ignore the massive shift when 46 percent of Hispanic voters cast their ballots for Trump, with Hispanic men favoring him by 10 points. There is no end state of history so long as humans exist. There is no point in talking about destiny or understanding changes in civilization through a model that incorporates destiny, but Hispanics splitting their votes between the two major political parties is certainly a different demographic voting pattern than predicted by Democratic and Republican partisans.

In 2016, I wrote how the nativist reaction in California helped turn the state blue by convincing Hispanics and others to vote Democratic—among other changes in California. My 2016 piece was intended to warn Republicans against embracing immigration restrictionism. Last month, I updated that piece for an event at the University of Pittsburgh for the 30th anniversary of Proposition 187. I added these sections:

In October 2014, I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that argued the modern nativist movement may doom the national Republican Party to electoral defeat if it succeeded in taking over the party. I followed that up with other pieces, research, and appearances on television and the radio. My evidence was the history of the California Republican Party, the Federalists, Know-Nothings, and Whigs in the 19th century all committing seppuku on an altar of immigration restrictionism, and opinion polling that seemed to show that many non-white and younger voters rejected immigration restrictionism while also holding several mainstream or conservative opinions.

However, Republicans have done well since then by winning the 2016 Presidential election and they seem to be very close to winning in 2024 too. They bombed the 2018 midterm, lost the 2020 election, and underperformed in the 2022 midterms, but little if any of their underperformance there can be blamed on immigration and the border chaos in 2022 may have slightly helped the GOP. Most of their political problems since I wrote my WSJ op-ed stem from the personality of their presidential candidate in each election since 2014, the conservative electorate’s deference to him, and unrelated policy issues like abortion. Border chaos and the GOP’s restrictionist reaction to it may have even helped them. Thus, I was wrong about the political consequences of embracing an anti-immigration position.

Conservatives skeptical of immigration often go further, claiming that modern immigrants and their descendants are less likely to become Republicans than the descendants of earlier immigrant groups. Polls show that Hispanics lean Democratic in the 2024 election, but not by much. Polls like these overstate Democratic support among the subsequent generations of Americans because there are millions of descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who do not self-identify as Hispanic or Asian in polls because of ethnic attrition. Ethnicity and race (with the likely exception of being black) are not as sticky in the United States as many progressives and conservatives assume—the government just created a new one that will likely result in a new and deeply held ethnic identity for many because culture is often downstream of politics. Despite my warnings in The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, I’ve long maintained that immigrants and their descendants are basically assimilating to American policy and political opinions—for better and worse.

My research on immigrant policy opinions showed that their positions were similar to those of native-born Americans on most issues except for immigration, where immigrants supported liberalization. The policy and institutional effects of immigration were positive or neutral from a conservative perspective. However, immigrants and Hispanics still tended to vote Democratic and severely limited the reach of this research. After all, a self-interested politician would reasonably only look at voting patterns. Another problem was that everybody overlearned lessons from 1990s California. Yes, the GOP committed suicide there by embracing nativism—but the lesson did not translate to other states. The effect was not generalizable, as a social scientist would say.

Here’s how I ended my recent updated piece on Proposition 187 and immigration politics in California:

The California Republican Party’s decision to represent the anti-immigration wing of the American electorate in the early 1990s destroyed that state’s GOP for at least a generation in exchange for winning one election in 1994 and a symbolic victory on Proposition 187 that didn’t actually change policy. That was a bad deal. What happened in California at that time appears to be a perfect storm of events that undermined the GOP in that state, but state Republican Parties in other states that passed harsher immigration laws like Arizona, Texas, and Florida don’t seem to have suffered the same fate and neither has the national GOP.

The oft-repeated phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” should be replaced with “as California goes, so goes California” in at least this one case. Anti-immigration politics can likely explain California’s dramatic shift leftward, but that effect is confined to the Golden State. 

Immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well into American society and politics. The GOP didn’t need to moderate its immigration position, and maybe demographic voting patterns would have converged sooner with more of a GOP emphasis on law and order or other appeals than nativism, but that’s a counterfactual we can’t test and will never be able to. In all, I’m happier for the future of the United States that immigrants and their descendants are assimilating well than I would be if immigration were a political wedge issue like I thought it was a decade ago. This week’s election returns are dramatic evidence that immigrants and their children are assimilating to American political norms, that they are voting Republican in huge numbers, and that Donald Trump defeated the best politically self-interested argument for Republicans to oppose increased legal immigration.