From The New York Times
By Thomas B. Edsall
...Trump’s successful deployment of the issue of immigration to mobilize voters raises this question: Why is his opposition to immigrants and Mexicans in particular so resonant when immigration liberalization ostensibly has majority support in most polls?
Research conducted by Lefteris Jason Anastasopoulos, a lecturer and data science fellow at Berkeley’s School of Information, provides one answer: Support for immigration “may be greatly overestimated.”
In an email, Anastasopoulos writes that
polls conducted by large survey organizations never ask about immigration in geographic context. Instead they ask questions about whether respondents support increasing immigration or granting amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the “United States” overall rather than, say, Dayton, Ohio, or Wilmington, North Carolina, places where immigration has been rapidly increasing over the past few years. This kind of abstract framing tends to push respondents toward giving more “politically correct” answers to standard poll questions about immigration.
The result is
a significant underestimation of the backlash against newly arriving immigrants and an overestimation of the support for immigration among the public.