Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the politics of immigration, as will our book on the 2024 election.
The scale of recent immigration helps explain why the issue has played a central role in American politics over the past few years.
Mayors and governors, both Democratic and Republican, have complained about the strain on local government. In Chicago and elsewhere, residents have filled public meetings to make similar criticisms. In Denver, where tens of thousands of migrants have arrived, homeless people say that shelter spots are harder to find. In Queens, residents say that an influx of street vendors has created chaos in some neighborhoods.
Some of the biggest effects have occurred in South Texas, and Mr. Trump made big electoral gains there. Eight years ago, he won less than 30 percent of the vote in a strip of six counties along the Rio Grande. This year, he won all six counties.
Elsewhere, Democrats who managed to outpace Vice President Kamala Harris and win tough congressional races — including in Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin — frequently criticized Mr. Biden’s border policies. Polls suggest that the immigration surge was Ms. Harris’s second biggest vulnerability, after only the economy.
Voters expressed particular frustration with the high recent levels of illegal immigration. Of the roughly eight million net new migrants who entered the U.S. during the Biden presidency, about five million did so without legal authorization, according to Goldman Sachs.
Some Republican politicians, including Mr. Trump, have spread falsehoods about recent immigrants, claiming that they have caused a crime wave. In truth, immigrants have historically committed crime at lower rates than native-born Americans, and crime fell nationwide over the past few years as immigration levels spiked.
Similarly, academic research suggests that the immigrants of recent decades, who have come primarily from Asia and Latin America, are climbing the economic ladder and assimilating into American society. Their children and grandchildren have made progress at a pace similar to that of the predominantly European immigrants of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
But high levels of immigration do have downsides, including the pressure on social services and increased competition for jobs. The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that wage growth for Americans who did not attend college will be lower than it otherwise would have been for the next few years because of the recent surge. On the flip side, higher immigration can reduce the cost of services and help Americans, many with higher incomes, who do not compete for jobs with immigrants
Bernard Yaros Jr., a lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, a research firm, described the recent increases as “something that we really haven’t seen in recent memory.” Mr. Yaros said that they had “helped cool wage growth.”
