The Best Political Argument for More Immigration Restrictions Just Failed

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.