Eric Levitz

And then often the polling changes.

Public opinion can shift with conditions.

So during the Biden administration,

when there were large inflows of asylum seekers.

Illegal crossings are over 2,500 per day.

Come on, man.

That leads to a backlash where people are more prioritizing their instinct about the law being important and enforcing immigration law being important and deportations being justified.

Now you have a move of the dial where, in the Trump era, we've remarkably seen a real collapse in unauthorized border crossings.

So in December 2023, at the US-Mexico border, there were 250,000 unauthorized border crossings in that month alone.

This past December, there were about

6,500.

Wow.

The situation has just so radically changed, you know, and I think this is what makes Trump's declining approval on immigration really remarkable, is that, you know, I think if he did almost nothing, he would have been able to declare victory on this issue and been very popular.

And so in this climate where we have basically a secure border,

And then we have this incredibly extreme, radical, and disruptive approach to immigration enforcement that also feels a bit indiscriminate, that doesn't seem to be targeting the worst of the worst, as the administration often suggests.

I think that creates ripe conditions to activate the public's more sympathetic moral intuitions about interior immigration enforcement policy.

Do you see him moderating what he said at all?

You know, I will say that one important piece of context here that could prevent Trump from really taking this full retreat is that public opinion here is still a little bit

mixed and complicated.

So his approval rating on immigration is, you know, negative by, you know, between nine and 12 points, depending on what you look at.