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The divergence is even starker on the question of whether immigrants take Americans’ jobs. In 2004, just 14 percent of Republicans and Democrats said immigrants were “not at all likely” to take Americans’ jobs. In 2020, the figure among Republicans was roughly the same — 16 percent — while for Democrats it soared to 53 percent.
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A similar pattern holds for immigration levels: In 1994, just 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans on both sides wanted immigration levels to increase. They drifted apart gradually in the 2000s and suddenly in the 2010s. In 2022, 41 percent of Democrats, compared with 10 percent of Republicans, supported higher immigration levels. (These figures, which Ollerenshaw sent me, come from General Social Survey data released after the article was written.)
On the question of legal status for people in the United States illegally, Republican opinion has liberalized significantly, albeit not as fast as Democratic opinion. Only 20 percent of Republicans supported “amnesty programs for law-abiding illegal immigrants” in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, compared with 44 percent in 2022, the second year of the Biden administration. For Democrats, the percentage increased from 58 percent to 88 percent over the same period.
The trend toward divergence between the parties isn’t inexorable: Democrats’ opposition to more border patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border declined from a high of 74 percent during the first year of Trump’s presidency to 49 percent in 2022.
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In some cases, polarization has been more or less “symmetric” — for example, while the share of Democrats who think immigrants strengthen America rose by 18 percentage points between 2010 and 2021, it declined by 13 among Republicans. But the overall story of public opinion on immigration is more or less the opposite of what conventional asymmetric polarization theory would suggest: Instead of Democratic stability and a Republican shift rightward, the data show Republican stability and a Democratic shift leftward.
Journalist Kevin Drum has documented how opinion trends on abortion, same-sex marriage, guns, religion and taxes also don’t match the narrative of Republican radicalization as the driving force in the culture wars. And a 2019 New York Times analysis of party platforms showed that in both 2012 and 2016, the Democratic platform moved sharply to the left. The Republican platform, by contrast, moved modestly to the right in 2012, and modestly toward the center in 2016.
To be fair to the tea-party-era popularizers of asymmetric polarization theory, the Democrats’ progressive evolution wasn’t as pronounced a decade ago as it is today. And the fact that Republican stances on issues such as immigration have held steady or liberalized doesn’t mean the party hasn’t grown more radical along other dimensions. Parallel to asymmetric polarization, scholars have introduced the idea of “asymmetric constitutional hardball” — the idea being that Republicans are more willing to break norms to achieve their political objectives.
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That’s also debatable, but it gets closer to the reality of how American politics is changing. Even if Republican policy preferences have remained fairly balanced, the party’s style of governance has been anything but. From the Obama-era debt brinkmanship to the rise of Trump to the toppling of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the modern GOP has been divided and chaotic. Compare McCarthy’s fate with former speaker Nancy Pelosi’s — establishment Democratic leaders have been able to retain firmer control over their party despite its faster ideological transformation.
A more complete account of American polarization, then, might go something like this: Partisan sorting and ideological changes among America’s elite have thrust the Democratic Party leftward, and the Republican Party has embraced more extreme tactics in response. That diagnosis doesn’t imply any particular solutions, but it’s more accurate than the self-satisfied liberal story of singular Republican blame for America’s increasing ungovernability — a story that itself greased the skids for the polarization of the past decade.
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In the early 2010s, as tea party Republicans bitterly clashed with President Barack Obama, political scientists and pundits popularized a comforting theory to explain America’s growing partisan divide. “Asymmetric polarization” held that while it might seem as though the parties were drifting apart simultaneously, that was an illusion: The Democratic Party was holding more or less steady while the GOP radicalized.
“We should be careful not to equate the two parties’ roles in contemporary political polarization: the data are clear that this is a Republican-led phenomenon,” wrote four political scientists in 2012.
It’s time to retire this conventional wisdom, which distorts debates about U.S. politics. The latest evidence comes from a study of immigration opinion in Public Opinion Quarterly, an academic journal published by Oxford University Press. Immigration has been perhaps the most polarizing issue of the past decade: It was the subject of Obama’s most boundary-pushing uses of executive authority and the key issue in Donald Trump’s outsider bid for the Republican nomination in 2016. Now border security is roiling Congress and could prove decisive in the 2024 election.
Partisan opinions on immigration have indeed polarized, as these events suggest. But it’s Democratic opinion that has driven the partisan divorce, as Trent Ollerenshaw of Duke University and Ashley Jardina of the University of Virginia show in their paper, “The Asymmetric Polarization of Immigration Opinion in the United States.” They write: “Among Republicans, opinion on immigration has remained mostly stable” since the 1990s. Meanwhile, “the marked liberalization in immigration opinion among Democrats has left partisans more divided on immigration than at any point since national surveys began consistently measuring.”
Americans’ average feelings toward immigrants who are in the country illegally, for example, “have grown warmer” since 1988 — from 37 out of 100 in 1988 to 42 in 2004 to 49 in 2020. But “these warming trends emerged only among Democrats,” the authors note, so that “the partisan divide in evaluations expanded from 8 points in 1988 to 28 points in 2020.”
The divergence is even starker on the question of whether immigrants take Americans’ jobs. In 2004, just 14 percent of Republicans and Democrats said immigrants were “not at all likely” to take Americans’ jobs. In 2020, the figure among Republicans was roughly the same — 16 percent — while for Democrats it soared to 53 percent.
A similar pattern holds for immigration levels: In 1994, just 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans on both sides wanted immigration levels to increase. They drifted apart gradually in the 2000s and suddenly in the 2010s. In 2022, 41 percent of Democrats, compared with 10 percent of Republicans, supported higher immigration levels. (These figures, which Ollerenshaw sent me, come from General Social Survey data released after the article was written.)
On the question of legal status for people in the United States illegally, Republican opinion has liberalized significantly, albeit not as fast as Democratic opinion. Only 20 percent of Republicans supported “amnesty programs for law-abiding illegal immigrants” in 2010, the second year of the Obama administration, compared with 44 percent in 2022, the second year of the Biden administration. For Democrats, the percentage increased from 58 percent to 88 percent over the same period.
The trend toward divergence between the parties isn’t inexorable: Democrats’ opposition to more border patrols along the U.S.-Mexico border declined from a high of 74 percent during the first year of Trump’s presidency to 49 percent in 2022.
In some cases, polarization has been more or less “symmetric” — for example, while the share of Democrats who think immigrants strengthen America rose by 18 percentage points between 2010 and 2021, it declined by 13 among Republicans. But the overall story of public opinion on immigration is more or less the opposite of what conventional asymmetric polarization theory would suggest: Instead of Democratic stability and a Republican shift rightward, the data show Republican stability and a Democratic shift leftward.
Journalist Kevin Drum has documented how opinion trends on abortion, same-sex marriage, guns, religion and taxes also don’t match the narrative of Republican radicalization as the driving force in the culture wars. And a 2019 New York Times analysis of party platforms showed that in both 2012 and 2016, the Democratic platform moved sharply to the left. The Republican platform, by contrast, moved modestly to the right in 2012, and modestly toward the center in 2016.
To be fair to the tea-party-era popularizers of asymmetric polarization theory, the Democrats’ progressive evolution wasn’t as pronounced a decade ago as it is today. And the fact that Republican stances on issues such as immigration have held steady or liberalized doesn’t mean the party hasn’t grown more radical along other dimensions. Parallel to asymmetric polarization, scholars have introduced the idea of “asymmetric constitutional hardball” — the idea being that Republicans are more willing to break norms to achieve their political objectives.
That’s also debatable, but it gets closer to the reality of how American politics is changing. Even if Republican policy preferences have remained fairly balanced, the party’s style of governance has been anything but. From the Obama-era debt brinkmanship to the rise of Trump to the toppling of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the modern GOP has been divided and chaotic. Compare McCarthy’s fate with former speaker Nancy Pelosi’s — establishment Democratic leaders have been able to retain firmer control over their party despite its faster ideological transformation.
A more complete account of American polarization, then, might go something like this: Partisan sorting and ideological changes among America’s elite have thrust the Democratic Party leftward, and the Republican Party has embraced more extreme tactics in response. That diagnosis doesn’t imply any particular solutions, but it’s more accurate than the self-satisfied liberal story of singular Republican blame for America’s increasing ungovernability — a story that itself greased the skids for the polarization of the past decade.
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