Ronald Brownstein, Columnist

Republicans Don’t Fear a Backlash on Immigration. They Should.

Most GOP senators and congresspeople represent areas with relatively few immigrants. But winning the White House is a different story.

July 14, 2025 at 7:00 AM EDT

By Ronald Brownstein

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a CNN analyst and previously worked for The Atlantic, The National Journal and the Los Angeles Times. He has won multiple professional awards and is the author or editor of seven books.

Probably not represented by a Republican member of Congress.
Photographer: Mario Tama/Getty Images

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Congress has not passed a single bill as unrelentingly hostile to immigrants as the recently approved GOP budget mega-bill in decades, if not a full century. Simultaneously, the new GOP budget bill allocates a breathtaking $170 billion to escalate President Donald Trump’s program of militarized mass deportation aimed at undocumented immigrants and revokes access to much of America’s social safety net for broad categories of legal immigrants.

A new Bloomberg analysis of Census data helps explain why virtually all Congressional Republicans felt comfortable approving so many harsh measures targeting both legal and undocumented immigrants alike: Hardly any of them must fear a direct political backlash from those policies.