Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.

Emily Schaefer supports mass deportations. She wants less immigration. And she opposes a path to citizenship for undocumented people who have been living in the United States for decades.

She is not a Republican.

Ms. Schaefer, 52, is a lifelong Democrat who said that she “cannot stand” Donald J. Trump. Yet she voted for him.

“I have never voted for a Republican, ever. But we are being flooded with immigrants who are prioritized over the needs of citizens,” said Ms. Shaefer, who lives in Beaverton, Ore.

Ms. Schaefer said that Mr. Trump’s tough approach to immigration resonated with her for many reasons. The quality of education at her 15-year-old son’s public school has declined because of the large population of students who do not speak English, she said. In Oregon, many undocumented people are eligible for health care, based on their low incomes. They receive assistance from nonprofits while needy Americans struggle, she said.

“It’s absurd what Biden and Harris have allowed,” she said.

The surge in migration across the southern border, which reached record levels during the Biden administration, has reverberated across the country and hardened many Americans’ views on immigration.

While Republican voters have shown the biggest shift, Democrats and independents have also moved to the right, according to polls conducted in recent months.

In July, 55 percent of Americans told Gallup that they supported a decrease in immigration. That share was 28 percent in 2020.

Mr. Trump rode to victory painting migrants as a menace, an “invasion” of foreigners from developing countries who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Resolving the problem would demand a “bloody story,” he said — an operation to deport immigrants en masse. He would invoke the Alien Enemies Act , an obscure, centuries-old law to achieve it.

Recent polling found that a majority of voters favored elements of Mr. Trump’s approach.

Fifty-seven percent of voters in a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in October said they supported deporting immigrants living in the country illegally, including about 30 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of independents.

Slightly more than half of voters nationally, including 20 percent of Democrats, said they supported a wall on the border with Mexico, a marked increase from 2016 and 2020, when about 40 percent supported building a wall.

“There is no constituency left in this country that favors large-scale immigration,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute.

During President Biden’s term, political turmoil, criminal violence, climate change and the economic ruin wrought by the coronavirus pandemic in many countries fueled migration at a scale not seen since World War II. Beyond the factors driving migrants out of their home countries, the U.S. job market was a powerful draw, with unemployment at its lowest level in decades.

“Changes in the global migration system made it inevitable that there would be increased pressure on the U.S. border,” said Wayne Cornelius, an immigration scholar and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego.

But Republicans, Democrats and independents interviewed by The Times blamed the Biden administration for failing to acknowledge the chaos at the border and promptly take aggressive steps to address it.

Karen Bobis, 25, a registered independent who is originally from the Philippines, said that she had cast a ballot for Mr. Trump because of his stance on illegal immigration.

While she and other family members had waited years to win approval to immigrate legally to the United States, she said, people without permission were walking right into the country.

They should follow the process, with “paperwork and everything,” said Ms. Bobis, who voted on Tuesday outside Reno, Nev.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general, touted her record as a border-state prosecutor who took on drug cartels and gangs, and her ads championed her support for “the toughest border control bill in decades,” a bipartisan bill that collapsed after Mr. Trump urged his party not to support it.

“I was so angry, just so angry, that a lot of the Democratic Party wouldn’t say it was a crisis, let alone propose anything to deal with it,” said Sonya Duffy, 53, a Democrat who lives in New York City. She said that she voted for Ms. Harris because reproductive rights were her overriding issue.

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Rodrigo Garcia, 26, grew up in a Mexican American family. On Tuesday, in Milwaukee, he voted for Donald Trump a second time.

“I feel like there should be a certain limit of the people that come into America, instead of just letting everybody come in,” he said.

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