While anti-immigration Republicans are a minority, they might still get their way
President Donald Trump angered this week with his seeming willingness to come to a deal with Democrats to keep many illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Anti-immigration pundits like radio host and columnist are positively fuming at Trump. Coulter even appeared to endorse and seceding from the United States: Steve King, a Republican congressman from Iowa who frequently makes statements that connect him to the “alt-right” (such as his claim that deported illegal immigrants can go back to their native lands to teach how “ ”), was similarly apoplectic. “Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair,” he tweeted after news broke that the president may have cut a deal. “A party this out of sync with its voters will collapse and splinter,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday night. Despite the anger of Trump’s hardcore media supporters, however, the available political science data suggest that their predictions are likely to be wrong. Long before Trump’s political star rose, the Associated Press conducted a poll in May 2015 which indicated that favored keeping in the country those who were protected by former president Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. 55 percent of Republicans in the survey said they would be willing to vote for a candidate who kept DACA in place. As the issue has come further into the national political conversation, the Republican numbers have not been moving in a more enforcement-oriented direction. In a, just 21 percent of respondents who leaned Republican said they favored making deportation the top priority on immigration. In a Politico poll released last week, said they believed that “Dreamers,” those protected by DACA, should be deported.
