Local support for the US–Mexico border wall and local immigration policy

ABSTRACT

A signature policy of former US President Donald Trump was his plan to halt unauthorized migration from Mexico by building a wall the length of the US–Mexico border. While the existing research has identified several political, demographic and spatial correlates of individual-level support for (or opposition to) the wall, existing research has yet to provide local-level estimates of aggregate support for a border wall and an account of its spatial distribution. Using multilevel regression and synthetic poststratification (MrsP) and data from large-scale public opinion surveys conducted between 2016 and 2022, this article presents county-level estimates for support for the US–Mexico border wall. The results demonstrate that while a majority of the American public opposes the construction of the wall, there is substantial variation in county-level support. Support for the wall is highest in areas where Trump received strong support in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. Support is also linked to proximity to the US–Mexico border and racial–ethnic composition at the county level in complex ways. It is similarly linked to county-level cooperation (or lack thereof) with federal immigration enforcement, pointing to an opinion–policy link at the local level.

KEYWORDS:

• United States
• US–Mexico border
• public opinion
• multilevel regression and poststratification
• border security
• immigration policy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper was originally presented at the 2021 annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research held virtually, and the inaugural 2022 MapleMeth conference held at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Thanks are due to Courtney Kennedy and Hannah Hartig at the Pew Research Center, and Patrick Murray and Carolyn Lau at the Monmouth University Polling Institute for generously providing the restricted versions of their survey datasets. Thanks are also due to Austin Pettis and Jack Chen at Momentive for helping make the SurveyMonkey endpage surveys happen, to Joseph Ornstein at the University of Georgia for promptly making requested feature additions to his SRP package for R, and to Daniel Thompson at the University of California, Los Angeles for sharing data on county-level immigration policies.

DATA AVAILABILITY

Replication materials are available at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/QMBYC

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DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.