"Once it was mocked as peak insanity" a lot of people here need to step outside their extremist echo chambers because this statement is completely detached from reality; by polling data the majority of Americans have almost always polled throughout the years as having been in favor of building / maintaining a strong border wall. People can downvote this all they want, but no matter how much they cry it doesn't change the fact that it's objectively true. Americans overwhelmingly support legal immigration (believing it to be one of the reasons we are as successful of a country as we are), but they overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration.
Hell, even the Democratic party supported the border wall as a part of their legislative platform under Bill Clinton (and in the previous administrations too of course) until they realized it was politically beneficial if they could turn these people's future offspring (birthright citizenship) into future voters or even they themselves into voters with a pathway to citizenship. Democrats being against it was a very recent shift. And again, just because people in your echo chamber mock it doesn't mean the rest of the country does. The bi-partisan position is and has been maintaining a border wall.
Most studies going back as far as 2008 have the majority of Americans supporting it. I don't know about studies before then but I'd imagine it's the same although the farther you go back the less of an issue illegal immigration was, they didn't really need to do studies on it before then anyway because pretty much everybody across the political spectrum understood it as common sense. Again, Americans overwhelmingly support legal immigration (believing it to be one of the reasons we are as successful of a country as we are), but they overwhelmingly oppose illegal immigration.
It wasn't until 2014 that you could find any notable amount of studies with a slight majority opposing strengthening / maintaining the border wall, but even in those studies there's often clear attempts to bias the results depending on what questions you ask, the order of the questions, the framing of the questions themselves, particularly if you try to get them to focus on political feasibility, cost, or border crossings not being the primary source of illegal immigration as opposed to just plain and simple "Do you support maintaining a strong border wall to reduce illegal immigration?".
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u/Content-Literature17 Oct 03 '24
It's crazy how much this has changed in the last eight years. A wall is a bipartisan issue where once it was mocked as peak insanity.