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1/n To 'commemorate' Trump's emergency declaration, I went ahead and assembled a dataset of every single survey asking about support for a wall/fence dating back to the early 90s (when, surprisingly, support for a barrier was actually pretty low across the board).
2/n As you can see below, the number of Americans in favor of erecting a barrier on the Mexican border jumped mightily from the 90s into the 00s. During the Obama admin, it appears to have stabilized in the upper 40%/low 50% range. 
3/n In fact, it even managed to obtain around 40% of support among Democrats during the early Obama years. Even 35-40% of White liberals bought into it! And then something happened...
4/n Obviously, there's no suspense here. Trump launched his campaign, started running his mouth, and *poof* support drops precipitously
5/n In August of 2015, just a few months after Trump entered the race, around 35% of Democrats still supported the wall. But over a year later, that figure fell to 10% and below (where it still remains today)
6/n So there you have it folks. One caveat is that some of the questions varied across the period of study (e.g. some asked about a fence, some a wall, some specified lengths of the fence [e.g. 700, 670]).
7/n Nevertheless, I was surprised to see that responses in given years to different items were largely invariant to the wording (i.e. two different formulations of the question yielded largely the same levels of support/opposition).
8/n I plan on constructing similar datasets for other [illegal] immigration-related attitudes (e.g. increasing border patrols, requiring employers to conduct background checks). So stay tuned!
9/n Largest drops in support seem to come from the younger age categories
10/n As with support for the wall, after decades of relative stability (around the 80% mark) the percent of Democrats who view illegal immigration as a somewhat serious or very serious problem fell off a cliff in 2015.
11/n In 2018, just under 1 in 4 Democrats (23%) said it wasn't 'serious at all'--the highest mark on record.
12/n Here is a link to all the data sources/question wording drive.google.com/open?id=1bzSeV…
13/n Here's another on support for deploying troops to help patrol the southern border. And here's a link to the surveys/question-wording used drive.google.com/open?id=1wPGII…
