'67% of GOP Think Arrival of Large Numbers of Migrants is a Critical Threat to The U.S. - Only 16% of GOP Leaders Agree.'

For much of my life, I believed in open borders. Aside from violent criminals, I could think of no person who had entered this country illegally or overstayed a visa who deserved to be sent away. But in fact, I had thought little about the matter. I simply meant well, and I knew that all well-meaning people believed in welcoming migrants. Only the uncouth disagreed.

In the summers during college, I worked construction--wiring hog houses, running pipe, digging trench. When another man on the crew complained about "illegals" taking American jobs, I knew that he was a bigot. I tried not to judge him for it, just as I did not judge him for dipping tobacco. But I instinctively felt that these things (like my nonjudgmental stance itself) separated me from him. When my cousin, the only non-Guatemalan on his landscaping crew, began picking up Spanish, I was heartened: His experience was being enriched.

At the end of each summer I returned to college, where everyone agreed with me. We stood on one side of a great divide in public opinion, a divide that pits elites against workers, those who benefit from immigration against those who do not. George Borjas, professor of economics at Harvard, has argued that increased immigration has immediate financial benefits for elites but provides little or no benefit to the working class. But the divide is cultural as much as economic: In both Europe and America, one side prizes national identity and citizenship; the other, mobility and openness.

A 2016 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 67 percent of Republicans think the arrival of large numbers of immigrants and refugees is a critical threat to the U.S. Only 16 percent of Republican leaders think so. A similar, but smaller, divide exists on the Democratic side, where only 4 percent of Democratic leaders view current immigration levels as a critical threat, compared to 27 percent of their public. Nor is the divide limited to any one race. In 2018, the Pew Research Center found that "Latinos with lower levels of education are more likely than those with at least some college education to say too many immigrants are living in the country today."

Confident that I opposed all forms of bigotry, I failed to notice that support for migration is characterized in no small part by contempt. Our elites portray working-class Americans as violent, hateful, and incompetent. They revel in their suffering.

In 2016, audience members who had paid a median $1,600 to see the musical Hamilton awarded their heartiest applause to the line, "Immigrants--we get the job done!" The following year, Lin-Manuel Miranda released a song based on that line. It was a statement of immigrants' superiority to native-born Americans--and a promise to cause them pain: "Y'all ain't been working like I do," the lyrics went. ¡§I¡¦ll outwork you, it hurts you.¡¨

Hamilton was celebrated by elites across the political spectrum. This is fitting, for contempt for working-class Americans is a bipartisan affair. In a 2017 column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens proposed, "So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones." In 2017, William Kristol said during a discussion with Charles Murray, "Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don't you want to get new Americans in? . . . I'm serious." In 2018, Max Boot wrote in the Washington Post that Trump's supporters were "grumpy old white people who live in rural areas and lack college degrees." In another column, he said that he wanted to "keep the hard-working Latin American newcomers" and "deport the contemptible Republican cowards" in Congress who had supported Donald Trump. Jennifer Rubin, his colleague at the Post, tweeted her agreement.

Contempt for Western workers is often justified in economic terms. In 2013, a staffer for Senator Marco Rubio said that America needed more low-skill migrant workers, because "there are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can't cut it . . . who just can't get it, can't do it, don't want to do it." Jeb Bush said in 2013, "Immigrants create far more businesses than native-born Americans. . . . Immigrants create an engine of economic prosperity."

If these comments had been directed at migrants, the men who made them would have been widely condemned. Such consideration is rarely shown for working-class Americans who object to immigration. They are instead viewed as bigots who deserve disinheritance. In Hillary Clinton's famous formulation, they are "deplorables": "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic--you name it."