It was only 11 years ago that a majority of Senate Democrats voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which called for 700 miles of fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border. It was just 10 years ago that Sen. Bernie Sanders voted against comprehensive immigration reform. [...]
Long before Trump made building a wall along the southern border one of his main campaign issues, some Democrats were open to the idea of fencing along the border. In a May 2006 Gallup survey, before Congress voted on the Secure Fence Act, nearly 40 percent of Democratic voters were in favor in favor of “building a wall along the border with Mexico.” And support for a wall generally held through the first part of this decade. [...]
More recently, however, Democratic support for a border wall has plummeted. Support dropped to just 29 percent for “building a wall along the entire border with Mexico” in a Pew Research Center survey in September 2015. And by February of this year, just 8 percent of Democrats were for it in Pew’s polling, while 89 percent were opposed. [...]
Democratic voters have also become far more in favor of granting citizenship to immigrants in the country illegally. To be clear, Democrats have always been in favor of a path to citizenship. In a January 2006 Time/SRBI poll, 72 percent of Democrats favored “allowing illegal immigrants now in this country to earn U.S. citizenship if they learn to speak English, have a job and pay taxes.” But that still left a sizable minority of Democrats, 24 percent, opposed to such a proposal. In fact, Republicans were actually slightly more likely than Democrats to say they were in favor, at 77 percent.
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