Public Opinion on Border Security in North America

• In Event: The Microdynamics of Border Control

Abstract

In recent years, conflicts, criminal violence, and climate change have catalyzed major movements of people across borders. These migrant crises—in combination with the rise of nativism and populism—have drawn renewed global attention to the politics of borders. Previous academic and government research evaluates mass opinion on perceptions of insecurity, support for immigration, and responses to conflict and criminal violence. However, only a limited amount of public opinion research considers broader border-focused questions, such as how the public thinks about borders and engages with border security. This paper explores North American public opinion on international borders, particularly border security. First, we present a meta-analysis of U.S. poll questions on border security from the late 1970s to the present. In addition, our discussion of the phrasing of border-focused and immigration-focused questions in media polls over time illustrates how conversations surrounding borders change over time. Next, we describe the results of original nationally representative surveys run in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We compare measures of perceptions of border security at each country’s northern and southern border and use text analysis of open survey responses to decipher what informs those opinions. Moving beyond usual public opinion research, we complement these results with a survey of local government officials in the U.S. We hypothesize that an individual’s proximity to an international border alters her concept of the border community and related security issues. This project is the first step in developing a comprehensive understanding of how people think about and politically engage on border security. Our findings have implications for both research on the concept of borders across subfields in IR and policy decisions for border communities.

Authors

• Lauren Pinson, University of Texas at Dallas

• Beth A. Simmons, University of Pennsylvania