How did immigration politics get so toxic?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

50% : Both factors help explain why lawmakers were willing to tackle immigration reform at the same time.
40% : It's hard to say which was more representative of the long-gone mood -- a quote from one of the bill's sponsors that proclaimed 2013 "the year of immigration reform," or the fact that the senator who said it was the South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham.
36% : "Once Trump became president, he did things at the border that others had long rejected because they weren't practical or legal.
35% : House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his primary race in 2014, and his willingness to embrace immigration reform had been one point of attack for his Tea Party opponent.
34% : Given all his bluster, it's easy to forget that Trump oversaw his fair share of border chaos.
21% : Well, Trump certainly had a lot of political will, yet illegal entry, if you measure apprehensions, actually doubled from FY 2016 to FY 2019.
19% : And it was Republicans who killed it, heeding House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who promised that the bill would "be dead on arrival" in his chamber, and Trump, who called on Congress to reject the bill if it wasn't "perfect.
12% : In mirror-image political obituaries, NBC called Cantor "a casualty of immigration reform" and Politico said Cantor's loss "kill[ed] immigration reform.
12% : Biden's order rests on legal justifications that were rebuked when Trump used them to try to back up several immigration actions, and it's already being challenged in court.

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