The real question might be why the Trump administration has been so strongly opposed to nearly all forms of immigration, given its political interest in maintaining the multiracial coalition that delivered Republican victories in 2024. The answer is ideology and gets to the very roots of Trumpism.
I have a unique perspective on this issue, having been involved in conservative circles for the last 16 years. I was a writer for far-right websites years before Trump emerged as a presidential contender, and more recently I contributed to Project 2025. As I’ve come to reject nativist ideas, I’ve seen them spread from a faction within conservative politics to swallowing the whole movement.
You can see how white nationalist ideas have taken over the Republican Party in the current debate happening on the right over the status of Nick Fuentes, the Holocaust-denying extremist who recently got a friendly airing on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. For many young conservatives, whether to marginalize Fuentes amounts to a question of whether they should support merely an implicit form of white nationalism or get behind a figure like him who more honestly reflects what they think.
Recall that when Trump first announced he was running for president in 2015, the controversy that resulted from his initial speech involved his reference to people coming over the border as “rapists.” The first member of Congress to endorse Trump was Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was best known for being a favorite of nativists for his strong stand against immigration. At the time, mainstream Republicans were opposed to illegal immigration, but Sessions stood out as someone who was unusual in building a public profile arguing that fewer people should be allowed into the country regardless of legal status.
Through Sessions, Stephen Miller entered into Trump’s orbit. People who have known Miller have explained that he has since his youth been concerned about the changing demographics of the country. Over the last decade, as other advisers and officials have come and gone, Miller has stayed close to Trump. So much so that, according to Rolling Stone, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department are largely run through him. In 2015, Ann Coulter published “¡Adios America!,” a screed against mass migration. She later claimed that Trump received an advance copy of her book and told her he had read it cover to cover. Coulter would become one of the most prominent early boosters of his 2016 campaign, on the grounds that immigration was the only issue that mattered.
Trump is obviously no intellectual, but to the extent that there was intellectual energy around his 2016 campaign, it was found in the “alt right.” Figures in this movement argued — sometimes with facts on their side, sometimes not — that immigrants were prone to crime, highly dependent on welfare, and aligned with the Democratic Party. If large-scale immigration continued, Republicans would lose on every other issue and be permanently shut out of power. These ideas have been completely mainstreamed in the Republican Party since then, but at the time they were considered fringe positions.
Over the years, people who prioritize stopping demographic change have flocked to MAGA, as those with more cosmopolitan and less nativist attitudes have been pushed out. The severe immigration policy pushed by DHS reflects the influence of Miller and other officials for whom America First was always centered on the idea that foreigners were a threat to the future of the country.
In spite of all this, some analyses suggest that Trump may have actually won naturalized immigrants in 2024. If nativists were concerned that mass migration meant a permanent Democratic majority, here was proof that this didn’t need to be the case. Yet for many of them, arguments about how newcomers voted were largely a pretense. They simply did not like seeing whites become a minority in the United States. In 2019, it was revealed that Stephen Miller had been sharing articles from white nationalist websites before he came into the White House.
With the recent election results, conservatives have gone back to hyping the political threat of new arrivals voting Democratic. As it became clear that Republicans had suffered a horrible string of defeats last Tuesday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Mass immigration — both legal and illegal — has profoundly changed Virginia and destroyed California.” Christina Pushaw, a communications aide to Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, likewise fired off a series of tweets blaming immigration for Republican losses, as did members of Congress.
Notably, few on the right argued in 2024 that Hispanics, Asians, and new arrivals turning toward Trump suggested Republicans should perhaps be more welcoming. Immigrants tried voting Republican and in response got an administration that made it a priority to target their communities while blaming them for everything going wrong in the country. Now that Asians and Hispanics, many of them immigrants themselves or related to recent arrivals, are predictably responding by returning to the Democratic fold, immigration is portrayed as a force that will inevitably shift the country to the left.
This only makes sense once you understand that nativism is at the ideological heart of Trumpism. We can see the same biases at work when Republicans claim that immigrants commit a lot of crime and that H-1B recipients are an economic threat to the country — each of these views going against a mountain of data and expert opinion. Many within the MAGA coalition and at the highest levels of government simply don’t want any more nonwhite people from exotic cultural backgrounds around and will make up whatever excuses they need to in order to justify keeping such people out of the country.
Movements will often do things that go against their political self-interest when it is required by their ideological commitments. The Trump administration’s war on immigration is one such case.