Immigration has consistently taken center stage during the 2024 election cycle, with former President Donald Trump promising to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in history, and Vice President Kamala Harris vying to keep the southern border "closed." But as anti-immigration rhetoric continues flying around, does this translate into electoral wins? Not necessarily.
That conclusion comes from a new study by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at American University. They looked at competitive elections during the 2022 midterm cycle who used anti-immigrant sentiment through X, debate responses, campaign website, YouTube ads and more.
The study found that almost 60% of anti-immigration candidates lost their respective races, compared to only 41% who won. That trend may affect Republicans more, since that party's candidates tend to more often communicate their opposition to immigration compared to their Democrat counterparts.
That was the case for Republican candidate for the Senate in Pennsylvania Mehmet Oz, who stated in an ad back in 2022 "the Biden administration's failure on the border is so massive that they are flying illegal immigrants up to airports like this where illegal immigrants are being taken on buses. Now every state has become a border state."
Oz would go on to lose the seat he was fighting for to Democrat John Fetterman by around five percentage points.
A similar story is seen with GOP candidate for the U.S. House, Mark Robertson, who ran in 2022 to represent Nevada's District 1. During his campaign, he would often mention his goal was to "turn off the illegal flow of people coming into our country... end chain-migration, visa lotteries and vacation-birth citizenship." Ending "vacation-birth citizenship" implies a possible erasure of birthright citizenship.
Robertson then lost his bid for the House to Rep. Dina Titus at 46% to her 51%. Now, two years later, Titus and Robertson are facing each other again after redistricting has changed much of the district's boundaries.
In fact, according to The Nevada Independent's Janelle Calderon reported, "the redistricting process altered [Titus'] district boundaries, adding in more Republican-heavy suburban areas and suddenly making her re-election bid less of a sure thing."
The Center concludes that there was overall limited success for anti-immigrant campaigns in the 2022 midterm elections. Overall, this type of narrative is not a guarantee for winning elections, instead, it may be an electoral vulnerability as it does not lead to more success in competitive elections.
The report comes as the last month before Election Day is in full force and immigration continues to be a top priority issue.
On one hand, Vice President Harris is touting at introducing a different legislative priority than her upstart campaign, pledging to sign into law "the toughest bipartisan border security bill in decades," one without any route to citizenship.
Trump, on the other hand, continues to spew these sentiments which have been central to his campaign since the 2016 election. At a recent rally in North Carolina, he likened the influx of migrants to an "invasion." He said, "this invasion is destroying the fabric of our country," falsely claiming "every job in this country produced over the last two and a half years has gone to illegal aliens— every job."
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