As Trump stokes conflict at immigration demonstrations, will the public side with Trump or the demonstrators?

Attacks on immigrant workers are accelerating as ICE zeros in on sites where immigrants gather to find work, and outside courts where immigrants go because their legal status requires it. The demonstrations erupted in Los Angeles as ICE arrested day-laborers who lined up at Home Depot waiting to be selected by contractors. ICE is also aggressively sweeping LA garment shops dependent on immigrant workers. Trump and ICE claim they are only seeking to deport violent criminals. But this flimsy excuse collapses against the reality of hundreds of undocumented workers, most with no prior contact with law enforcement, caught up in these raids, torn away from their families and friends.

Does the public at large endorse these arrests? Don’t working-class people in general want these undocumented workers deported to alleviate job competition? That apparently reasonable commonsense claim turns out to be wrong. according to recent survey data.

I reviewed this data in a recent Substack, but it bears repeating because it is so important to clearly understand what working people actually support.

The Cooperative Election Study (CES), with more than 500,000 respondents, asked the following question repeatedly from 2010 to 2020.

“Are you in favor of granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.”

There are approximately one million undocumented workers in the LA area that fit this description. They are hard-working neighbors, families, and friends, not violent criminals. Clearly, they have wide-spread support withing the vast LA Hispanic community. But do Anglo workers support them?

I tackled that question in my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, by sorting the CES data to include only white respondents without four-year college degrees, who are also in the bottom two-thirds of the income distribution.

The data show that our commonsense understanding about white working-class resentment towards immigrants was justified in 2010 when only 32 percent supported the statement that granted legal status, but, by 2020, white working-class support for legalization jumped to 62 percent.

But that was way back in 2020, long before the Biden immigration surge. Have working-class sentiments about immigrants changed since 2020? Trump’s incessant pounding away at undocumented immigrants and his successful campaign in 2024 would suggest they would have.

We tested the exact same CES question again in a YouGov survey (April 2025) designed by the Labor Institute, the Center for Working Class Politics and the Rutgers Labor Education Action Research Network. The survey included 3,000 respondents from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, largely white working-class states.

Before the survey, I was certain that support had plummeted, given the rise of job insecurity and inflation during the last four years. I expected that more voters in those Rust Belt states would be worried about losing their jobs to low-wage immigrants and would therefore be more open to Trump’s deportation campaign. But I was mistaken.

In these four states, 63 percent of the respondents supported “granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years and have not been convicted of any felony crimes.” Only 34 percent opposed the statement.

I’ve heard activists say that black voters are more hostile to immigrant workers, because many work in lower-wage jobs that face competition from undocumented workers. Wrong again: 77 percent of the black respondents in these four states favored the proposal. In every demographic and income category strong majorities favored “granting legal status” to these “illegal” hard-working immigrants.

Why are the Democrats sleep-walking through this crisis?

Given this survey data, as well as just plain decency, the Democratic Party should be all over this issue. Democratic leaders of all ideological shades should be marching together arm-in-arm with the protestors, demanding a path to citizenship for hard-working, law-abiding undocumented workers. Why isn’t the Democratic leadership taking the lead?

I really don’t know. But I do know that their abdication leaves the field to Trump, who is doing all he can to provoke confrontations between the demonstrators and police, confrontations that play to his base’s fears and strengthens him. That would be much harder to do if Democratic elected officials were on the front lines. Trump’s getting away with this even though nearly two-thirds of the public doesn’t agree with him on deporting hard-working immigrants. That’s Democratic political malpractice.

If you step back and look at the broader picture, it sure seems like the Democrats have given up on bold support for working people. Yes, they will talk about the illegality of sending in the National Guard, they decry the blatant violations of habeas corpus, and they express concerns about Trump-the-Oligarch’s threat to democracy. But full-throated support for bringing immigrant workers out of the shadows and into citizenship? Radio silence.

It’s time to figure out, I think, how to create a new party of working people. As it turns out, I’m not alone. Nearly sixty percent of Rust Belt voters support that too! (More on that when we release our complete survey results, coming soon.)

Meanwhile, let’s hope that some Democrats join the activists on the frontlines, coming to the defense of working people in dire need of support. Is that really too much to ask of the one-time party of working people?

---

---