Political incentives and short-termism

The graph on total immigration numbers vs. percentage of the US population is from the Migration Policy Institute.

Evidence that the percentage of immigrants in the US peaked recently, but is in the ballpark of an earlier wave is from Pew Research. (n.b. I may have said in the episode that this was in 2023 or 24, when actually it was January 2025, more recent than I realized. I don't know if that matters!) 

In the episode I mentioned the Deportation Data Project. 

I also specifically mentioned my favorite public opinion dataset (which I will likely reference a lot in this show!), which is the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset.

I also recently wrote about some of these trends in an article for The Preamble, a digital magazine about US politics from Sharon McMahon. You’ll see some of the charts we talked about in the episode as well as links to other sources, particularly various additional Pew Research data, in the article.