Updating the conventional wisdom about immigration.

On August 5, 2026, Wave’s G. Elliott Morris presented at a communicators panel on the state of opinion on immigration, part of a conference hosted by America’s Voice. The talk was an invited presentation of findings from Wave’s previously published surveys and from public polling averages; no client commissioned it. The full slide deck is available above.

The argument

The post-2024 consensus held that raising the salience of immigration could only help the administration, so its opponents should talk about something else. The deck tests that claim directly. In a randomized experiment fielded in May 2025 (n = 1,000), respondents asked about mass deportations with no other context supported them 49–33; respondents first told about the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia opposed them 43–39. Raising the salience of the case moved net support 20 points against deportations — the conventional wisdom’s own mechanism, run as an experiment, producing the opposite of its prediction.

The aggregate record moved the same way: across an all-pollster average, net approval of the administration’s handling of immigration fell from +11 in February 2025 to −12 by early August 2026, turning what was its best issue into a liability.

The survey evidence behind it

The deck draws its survey findings from two Wave national surveys already published on this site: the February 2026 survey, in which 69% of U.S. adults said the administration is focusing too much on deportations and a supermajority backed a conditional path to legal status, and the May 2026 survey, in which majorities called the everyday consequences of stepped-up enforcement “going too far” and one in six of Trump’s own 2024 voters said they would not vote Republican in 2026. Question wording, toplines, and methodology for every survey number in the deck are in those releases.