An ICE agent during an operation in New York. Credit: Getty
In the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, a majority of Americans were fed up with the border crisis over which he’d presided. By then, its consequences were impossible to miss in nearly every major city: migrant families and children panhandling on the streets and in the subways; shelters and hotels overflowing with new arrivals; a string of high-profile assaults and homicides involving illegal migrants from the “Biden wave.”
President Trump built his 2024 re-election bid, in large part, on ending the border crisis and reversing mass migration. On the first front, external enforcement, he has unquestionably succeeded, as even Democrats grudgingly admit. Yet his broader efforts to reduce illegal and legal immigration have encountered resistance, often in unexpected places. Some of the fiercest opposition has emerged in areas of policy not obviously connected to immigration, while some of the most successful has come from within his own coalition.
This owes to the paradox of mass migration: as the share of foreign-born newcomers swells, voters become more determined to shrink it, while governments become less able to do so. Reversing mass migration, in other words, is hard. Really hard. Because migration entrenches itself and remakes recipient societies in indelible ways.
Public opinion in the late Biden years reflected the mounting frustration. In early 2024, Americans cited uncontrolled immigration as their no. 1 or no. 2 priority for three consecutive months — the first time they’d done so for multiple consecutive months in Gallup’s monthly trend assessment. Later that year, in June, Gallup found that 55% of Americans wanted immigration decreased, the highest share in more than two decades.
Trump took such polling as his new mandate. Immediately upon taking office, the president handed down sweeping executive orders to shut down the border, boost interior arrests of illegal and criminal immigrants, and (less concertedly) restrict legal immigration.
Nearly two years later, the results show Trump partially delivered on that mandate. Illegal crossings at the southern border have dropped by more than 90%, while legal immigration has slowed considerably. Fewer visas are being issued, and immigration processing has slowed considerably, with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services completing 74% fewer naturalizations in July 2026 than at the same point a year earlier.
But nowhere has Trump’s agenda been more aggressive, or more controversial, than in interior deportations. The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, estimates that interior deportations surged to roughly 120,000 in 2025, up about 150% from the 47,732 immigrants Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed from inside the homeland during Biden’s final full fiscal year.
These results have been obtained despite serious opposition from Democrats in Congress and Democratic-controlled states and cities, where many of the administration’s most intensive ICE operations have taken place. The administration’s aggressive interior enforcement tactics in particular have triggered intense media scrutiny and street-level backlash, contributing to public concerns over how arrests and deportations are being carried out.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that around 60% of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration. Yet disapproval of Trump’s enforcement tactics doesn’t appear to translate into broader opposition to his effort to curb immigration. The same annual Gallup survey that tracks Americans’ immigration preferences found earlier this year that a whopping two-thirds of Americans favor either maintaining today’s much lower levels of immigration or reducing it further. Americans may be uncomfortable with some of Trump’s hard-line tactics, but they appear to quietly favor the result.
By the standards of Western politics, Trump’s achievement — partially translating voters’ long-standing demand for lower immigration levels into actually lower inflows — is something close to a miracle. Across Europe, voters have for decades demanded less immigration, and elected governments promising to deliver it, only to watch as more and more newcomers flooded the system, squeezing workers’ bargaining power, straining social services, and contributing to social incohesion.
Spain’s case is instructive. In 2024, a national poll commissioned by the El País newspaper found that a clear majority of Spaniards believed the country already had too many immigrants. Yet mass migration persisted and in early 2026, the government launched an extraordinary regularization program initially estimated to convert roughly half a million illegal migrants into legal residents. By the time applications closed in June, nearly 1.2 million people had applied.
Then there was Brexit and its aftermath — perhaps the clearest example of the betrayal of voters’ desire for lower immigration levels. In 2016, a majority of British voters took the extraordinary step of rejecting the political and economic order that had governed their country for decades. Regaining control over immigration was at the center of the Leave campaign.
Yet even exiting the European Union, it turned out, wasn’t enough. The Tory governments ostensibly charged with overseeing the implementation of Brexit did the opposite. The annual number of people immigrating to Britain surged to 1.3 million in 2023, up from 589,000 in 2016.
The truth is that since the current era of mass migration began more than a decade ago, no other major Western country has yet managed to reverse the trend and sustain substantially lower levels of immigration despite widespread public demand to do so. Trump’s partial success in sustaining substantially lower immigration for nearly two years remains, for now, an anomaly in the Western world. And even that effort is partial, tentative, and vulnerable, as we will see.
The reason is straightforward. Immigration at sufficient scale doesn’t merely add people to a country. Over time, institutions and industries adapt themselves to their presence. Businesses — especially in sectors like hospitality, food, construction, and personal services — become dependent on migrants’ cheap labor. In parallel with this, government agencies and nonprofit contractors build programs around migrants, which these days generally means poorer populations from the Global South.
Those dependencies eventually create political pressure of their own, as employers, service providers, and local governments push national elected officials to protect the economic arrangements that have developed around migration. Immigration restriction therefore comes to mean more than stopping a flow of people. It means disrupting interests that have grown dependent on that flow.
Trump’s second term offers revealing examples of how this works. His immigration agenda has faced the resistance one expects from Democrats, including mass protests and federal lawsuits. Yet the greatest obstacles to his efforts to restrict immigration have not come from efforts to protect migrants themselves. Instead, they have come from federal elected officials in both parties seeking to protect the industries, labor markets, and government programs that have grown dependent on their presence.
Consider the 2025 government shutdown. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained plenty for Democrats to oppose on immigration, including tens of billions of dollars in new funding for ICE and the administration’s enforcement agenda. Yet when Democrats chose to force their most consequential confrontation with Trump, immigration enforcement wasn’t at the center of it. Health care was. Democrats blocked government funding for six weeks in what became the longest shutdown in American history, demanding that Republicans abandon the health-care provisions of the bill and preserve enhanced Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) subsidies that were scheduled to expire at the end of the year.
Here the paradox begins to reveal itself. The Biden-era immigration surge had become intertwined with the enormous expansion of government health subsidies. The CBO estimated that by 2024, the Biden surge had added roughly 600,000 migrant recipients of heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, private health insurance through ObamaCare. That was on top of another 300,000 foreign nationals receiving full Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) benefits.
The CBO projected that the insurance-premium tax credits for the surge population would add $66 billion to the federal deficit over the following decade, while Medicaid and CHIP spending would increase by another $40 billion. Much of that government spending ultimately became revenue for private health-care companies. ObamaCare subsidies pay premiums for plans sold by private insurers, while much of Medicaid coverage is administered by private firms. As migration increased the number of people eligible for subsidized coverage — aided by the Biden administration’s expansive use of parole and other humanitarian statuses that moved migrants into categories eligible for welfare benefits — it also expanded the market for the companies paid to insure them.
Here Trump’s immigration restriction efforts encountered an indirect kind of resistance. The fight wasn’t directly over migrants themselves, but over the flow of federal funding to private markets that had expanded alongside the growth of the migrant population. By the time Trump sought to unwind the enhanced subsidies, only four years after their creation, insurers had already adapted to the enormous market they created. Cutting them meant removing millions of subsidized customers and billions in revenue — a disruption significant enough that Democrats were willing to sustain the longest government shutdown in American history to prevent it.
In blue cities, meanwhile, mass migration — legal and illegal — functions like a permanent jobs bill for various groups, including public-school teachers amid otherwise declining enrollment; lawyers and other laptop workers in the NGO sector facing AI and automation; Left activists looking for a streetfighting cause to compete with the pleasures of Netflix and legal weed; and public functionaries struggling to justify their salaries amid out-migration from blue cities to suburbs and exurbs, and from blue states to red.
Put another way, as UnHerd’s Michael Lind has argued, mass migration provides a subset of the urban professional classes with a reason to maintain and expand the government agencies and NGOs that keep them employed.
Which brings us to the Right. Republicans’ resistance to portions of Trump’s immigration crackdown reveals the same paradox from the other direction. Where Democrats faced pressure from industries that had come to serve migrants as federally subsidized consumers and program enrollees, Republicans faced it from industries that had come to depend on them as cheap labor.
When workplace enforcement raids increased in 2025, Big Ag — one of America’s most forceful cheap-labor lobbies — warned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins that farmers and ranchers risked losing workers. Rollins took their concerns to Trump, who briefly directed immigration authorities to pull back enforcement at farms, hotels, and restaurants.
More recently, even as it has removed temporary protected status for Haitians and others, Team Trump held off terminating protections for more than 170,000 Salvadorans, apparently following intense pressure from the construction industry. In both cases, Trump found himself caught between the populist voters who elected him to enforce immigration law and Republican-aligned industries that had spent years building their businesses around the wage arbitrage made possible by inviting what Marx called a “reserve army of labor.”
The Trump administration and some congressional Republicans, moreover, have moved to expand guest-worker presence in migrant-heavy industries, most notably agriculture. A subset of the GOP, in other words, is prepared to tolerate high migrant flows in some regions, so long as the newcomers are tied to specific employers, can’t organize or vote, and continue to do jobs “Americans won’t do” (which is just cheap-labor-lobby speak for: jobs Americans won’t do at poverty wages).The upshot is mixed. Trump’s first two years have demonstrated that it is possible to end the age of mass migration. They also show the extraordinary political effort required to do it — and the multidirectional resistance. His most difficult battles have not always been with the liberal opposition, but with businesses, government programs, and other institutions that spent years adapting themselves to high immigration and now have an interest in its continuation.
Understanding this paradox matters as Western societies are at a breaking point after years of governments failing to respond to the growing demands of their people. A politics focused narrowly on reducing immigration numbers misses much of what sustains mass migration once it has taken hold. The more important target may be the sectors that have come to depend on migration. Industries, nonprofit agencies, and other institutions often play a quieter but more influential role in frustrating the changes voters demand. Reducing mass migration therefore requires more than changing immigration law. It also requires voters to elect governments willing to confront the domestic interests that have grown up around it, forcing them to adjust to lower levels of immigration.
There is a cost to waiting. If these interests grow powerful enough to completely prevent governments from translating public demands into policy, the consequences will extend beyond immigration itself to the very legitimacy of representative government.