The Gay Marriage Playbook Won't Work for Immigration

Why advocates should spend less time on persuasion and more on improving policies

A few years ago, while presenting my research on immigration attitudes to a room of policy advocates, I was politely but firmly told that studying what makes immigration policies more or less popular was not really necessary. Immigration support, my influential interlocutor explained, was already growing steadily, much like support for same-sex marriage. We just needed to keep telling people that immigration is good, correct the misinformation spread by bad actors, and wait for the generational tide to carry us forward. Why bother designing policies for popularity when popularity was already arriving on its own?

I have seen and heard versions of this argument more times than I can count. The comparison between immigration and same-sex marriage has become something like conventional wisdom among progressive advocates, a comforting story about the arc of public opinion bending toward openness. And it is not hard to see why the analogy is tempting. Both causes involve expanding rights and freedoms, face opposition rooted in cultural anxieties, and have seen meaningful shifts in public attitudes over recent decades.

The post-2024 reckoning over progressive immigration strategy has only reinforced the comparison. As the Trump administration’s enforcement measures take hold, public opinion is swinging back in a more pro-immigration direction. To many advocates, this looks like the tide turning, much as it did for gay marriage, and it would seem to validate the theory that immigration supporters should continue to focus on messaging. But support for same-sex marriage rose steadily for two decades and then locked in place (with some minor fluctuations): once Obergefell v. Hodges settled the legal question and millions of Americans came to know gay and lesbian people in their own lives, there was no mechanism to reverse the shift.

Immigration opinion, as I will try to convince you in this piece, does not work like this. The gay marriage analogy is wrong in ways that matter enormously for strategy. And the longer immigration advocates cling to it, the longer they will delay the kind of work that could actually make progress possible.

The triumph that became a template

The success of the same-sex marriage movement in the United States is genuinely extraordinary. In 1996, when Gallup first asked Americans whether marriages between same-sex couples should be legally valid, just 27 percent said yes. By 2015, when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, that number had crossed 60 percent. Today, it sits around 69 to 71 percent. This is one of the fastest and most dramatic opinion shifts in the history of American polling.

The movement achieved this through a combination of moral clarity, personal storytelling, and strategic litigation. Advocates refused to settle for civil unions. They framed their cause around love, commitment, and family, values that resonated across ideological lines. And crucially, as more gay and lesbian Americans came out to their families and communities, abstract opposition gave way to personal connection. It was, by almost any measure, a masterclass in social change.

It was also, as Jeremiah Johnson has argued, a deeply unusual case that progressives mistakenly adopted as a universal template. The gay marriage playbook (refuse compromise, frame opposition as bigotry, deny trade-offs, and wait for opinion to catch up) was then applied to issues ranging from health care to policing to immigration. Other like Jamie Paul and Lakshya Jain have noted that even within the LGBTQ movement itself, the playbook has not transferred well from marriage equality to the more contested terrain of gender identity and trans issues. Victor Kumar has recently argued that the structural conditions that made the “it gets better” trajectory work for gay rights (demographic scale, random distribution across families, the powerful contact effect of coming out) simply do not hold for every cause.

Immigration is one of those causes. And the mismatch runs deeper than most advocates realize.

Why the analogy breaks down

To be fair, there are similarities between immigration and same-sex marriage. Both involve, at some level, expanding personal freedoms and reducing legal discrimination based on characteristics largely beyond an individual’s control. Both efforts ask a majority to accept people whom some portion of the public views with suspicion or hostility. And in both cases, opponents have relied on fear-based messaging that exaggerates threats and dehumanizes the people in question. These parallels explain why thoughtful advocates reach for the comparison. But the structural differences are profound and show why a strategy built for one cause will fail the other.

Ingroup versus outgroup. Gay and lesbian Americans are, by definition, members of the national community. They are someone’s child, sibling, coworker, or neighbor. The success of the marriage equality movement depended heavily on this fact: the most powerful engine of attitude change was personal contact with people who were already part of the social fabric. Roughly 84 percent of Americans report knowing a gay or lesbian person personally, a figure made possible by the fact that LGB individuals constitute 8 to 10 percent of the population and are distributed randomly across families, communities, and political affiliations. The question was never whether they belonged, but whether they would be fully recognized.

Immigrants, and especially prospective immigrants who have not yet arrived, are outsiders seeking entry. While many Americans do know immigrants personally, the people whose admission is under debate are often thousands of miles away, invisible to the voters deciding their fate. The emotional and political dynamics are fundamentally different. You cannot “come out” as a future immigrant to your family at Thanksgiving dinner in America.

Already here versus seeking entry. The marriage equality movement asked the public to recognize a reality that already existed. Gay and lesbian couples were already living together, raising children, building lives. Legal recognition was about catching the law up with the facts. Immigration, by contrast, is primarily about regulating flows: how many people to admit, under what conditions, through what channels. The people whose fate hangs in the balance often have no presence in the host country and no voice in its politics. This is not a matter of recognizing what is, but of deciding what will be. That is a categorically harder sell, because the beneficiaries of more open policies are largely absent from the political conversation.

Symbolic recognition versus material trade-offs. Same-sex marriage was, for most Americans, essentially costless. Extending marriage rights to gay couples imposed no burden on straight couples’ marriages, finances, or daily lives. There are no material constraints on the number of marriage licenses. Granting more marriage licenses does not reduce the value of existing marriage licenses. This is a crucial and underappreciated feature of the issue, and one that Johnson identifies as the key reason the playbook fails when applied elsewhere.

Unlike marriage licenses, immigration involves real and perceived costs to people you care about the most: competition for jobs, pressure on public services, cultural change, and housing demand. Whether or not these costs are overstated in the aggregate (and economists generally agree that they are), they are not evenly distributed, and they are not imaginary to the communities that experience them most acutely. A strategy that worked for a costless cause will not work for one where trade-offs are genuine and felt.

Courts versus legislatures. Obergefell settled the marriage question through the judiciary. A single Supreme Court ruling made same-sex marriage the law of the land, regardless of what any state legislature thought. This created a kind of finality that is enormously powerful for social movements: once the ruling came down, the debate was effectively over, and the remaining task was cultural adjustment rather than ongoing political combat.

Immigration policy has no equivalent shortcut. While courts can and do adjudicate individual immigration cases, block executive overreach, and shape enforcement at the margins, the fundamental architecture of immigration (visa categories, numerical caps, enforcement priorities, funding levels) is set (or at least supposed to be set) by legislation. There is no Obergefell for immigration. Each policy change requires building and sustaining legislative coalitions, which means contending with the very public opinion dynamics that advocates hope to bypass through persuasion.

Salience and who has a voice. For LGBT Americans, marriage equality was intensely personal, arguably the most important political issue in their lives. This asymmetry in passion was a strategic asset: advocates cared more than opponents and organized accordingly.

The “other side” of the marriage debate, socially conservative voters, was not uniformly passionate about preventing it. Anti-gay-marriage organizations were vocal and well-funded, but their intensity was not shared by the broader base they claimed to represent. In 2004, a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage ranked 21st out of 22 national priorities in Pew polling. By 2014, more than a third of same-sex marriage opponents told PRRI the issue was not that important to them personally, and large majorities on both sides saw legalization as inevitable. Many rank-and-file opponents simply had other priorities and came to see the fight as not worth the political cost.

Immigration presents the opposite dynamic. The people who stand to benefit most from more open policies, potential immigrants abroad, have no vote, no voice, and no political power in the receiving country. Meanwhile, those who perceive themselves as bearing the costs of immigration often care about the issue intensely and have proven willing to organize politically around it, from Brexit to Trump’s 2024 campaign. The passion asymmetry runs the opposite way.

The limits of persuasion

None of this means that persuasion is useless. Alexander Coppock’s careful experimental work has shown that providing people with information about policy issues shifts attitudes by about five percentage points on average, and that this shift occurs roughly equally across the political spectrum. There is no “backlash” effect from trying to inform people. Similarly, David Broockman and Joshua Kalla’s deep canvassing experiments have demonstrated that non-judgmental, narrative-based conversations can reduce exclusionary attitudes toward immigrants already in the country, a meaningful and durable effect, even if modest in magnitude.

But there are reasons to believe that persuasion alone, no matter how sophisticated, cannot solve the immigration puzzle. First, immigration is a domain where counter-messaging is powerful and abundant. Anti-immigration advocates, from populist politicians to media figures to viral social media accounts, often care more about the issue than pro-immigration forces do, and they have a structural advantage: concrete stories of harm are more emotionally compelling than abstract statistics about aggregate benefits. For every careful study showing that immigrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in services, there is a vivid news segment about a local community overwhelmed by a sudden influx. Coppock’s own findings suggest that if persuasion moves people roughly equally in both directions, the side with more motivated and more prolific messengers may well have the edge.

Second, persuasion’s political relevance is limited by a basic fact about democracy: people do not directly set immigration policy. Even if a well-designed campaign moved public opinion several points in a more favorable direction, this would not automatically translate into legislative change. Immigration policy is shaped by legislative coalitions, interest groups, bureaucratic capacity, executive priorities, and, critically, how salient the issue is to voters at election time. Public opinion is merely one input, not a mandate. This is quite different from gay marriage, where opinion change combined with judicial action to produce a fait accompli.

Third, and perhaps most fundamentally, the trajectory of immigration opinion looks nothing like the steady upward march of support for same-sex marriage. Immigration attitudes are thermostatic: they react to the policy environment rather than following a secular trend. When a government is seen as having lost control of immigration, public opinion turns sharply restrictionist. When enforcement tightens, opinion softens. Gallup’s data illustrates this vividly: the share of Americans who said immigration should be decreased surged to 55 percent in 2024, then fell to 30 percent by 2025 as border crossings declined under the new administration’s enforcement measures. This is notan arc bending toward openness. Rather, it is a thermostat that adjusts up and down in response to perceived conditions. You cannot persuade your way past a thermostat.

What playbook would actually work

If the gay marriage playbook is the wrong model, what is the right one? A better analogy might be vaccination. Vaccines are among the most demonstrably beneficial interventions in human history, and yet persuasion alone has never been sufficient to achieve the uptake that public health requires. Anti-vaccine sentiment persists despite overwhelming evidence of efficacy, because persuasion, however well-founded, cannot single-handedly overcome entrenched suspicion, motivated counter-messaging, and the human tendency to weigh vivid anecdotes over aggregate data.

What actually works is not just telling people vaccines are safe and effective, but designing systems (school enrollment requirements, workplace policies, accessible distribution networks) that make vaccination the easy default. The product had to be genuinely good and the policy architecture had to make participation straightforward. Persuasion played a supporting role, but it was not the main mover.

Immigration needs a similar shift in thinking. Rather than pouring resources into campaigns designed to convince the public that all immigration is beneficial, a claim that is, at best, an oversimplification, advocates should focus on working with governments and policymakers to design immigration policies that are genuinely and visibly beneficial to receiving countries and communities. This is the difference between persuasion and what I have called making immigration popular by design.

What does this look like in practice? First, it means pushing for specific, well-designed programs rather than abstract openness. New visa categories for high-skilled workers who demonstrably fill acute labor market gaps. Labor mobility partnerships that connect migrant workers with employers in sectors facing genuine shortages, with built-in mechanisms for oversight and accountability. Private refugee sponsorship programs that give communities a direct stake in successful integration, turning residents from passive spectators of government policy into active participants with skin in the game. Administrative reforms that make the system faster, more predictable, and more transparent, so that the legal pathway is not so dysfunctional that circumventing it becomes the rational choice.

The common thread is specificity. The gay marriage movement had the luxury of a single, clear demand: let us marry. Immigration reform has no equivalent single slogan because immigration is not a single thing. It is dozens of distinct policy channels (family reunification, employment visas, refugee resettlement, student migration, seasonal labor, asylum), each with its own logic, constituency, and set of trade-offs. Treating immigration as a single cause that just needs its “marriage equality moment” obscures the reality that different policies enjoy vastly different levels of public support. Skilled worker visas are broadly popular. Large-scale low-skilled immigration is not. Pretending otherwise is self-deception.

Second, it means being honest about trade-offs. The gay marriage movement could afford to be maximalist because the cause was genuinely costless. Immigration is not costless, or at least it is not perceived that way, which in a democracy amounts to much the same thing. Advocates who dismiss public concerns about rapid demographic change, labor market competition, or the strain on local services are being strategically obtuse. The path to more open immigration runs through demonstrating that specific policies produce specific benefits, not through insisting that opposition is merely a product of ignorance or bigotry that better messaging will cure.

Third, as often emphasized by Matthew Yglesias and folks from Manhattan Institute, it means engaging with enforcement rather than treating it as the enemy. One underappreciated reason that support for same-sex marriage proved so durable is that the reform did not require the public to trust the government to manage a complex system. Marriage equality was self-executing: once legal, couples could simply marry. Immigration reform, by contrast, requires public trust that the government can administer new policies, that new visa holders will actually leave when their terms expire, that employers will be held accountable, and that the system will function as designed. Advocates who treat enforcement as inherently hostile to immigrant rights undermine the very trust that makes more open policies politically possible. The countries that have managed to sustain relatively open immigration (Canada, Australia, and, until recently, Germany) have done so in part by maintaining credible enforcement alongside expansion.

Finally, it means working with the thermostatic nature of public opinion rather than against it. If public attitudes soften when people feel the system is under control and harden when they feel it is not, then the most pro-immigration thing a government can do is create an immigration system that visibly works. This is counterintuitive for many advocates, who see enforcement and restriction as the problem rather than part of the solution. But the evidence is clear: the way to expand immigration over time is not to win an argument, but to build a system that earns and sustains public confidence.

The arc of progress is not automatic

The comparison between immigration and same-sex marriage flatters advocates by suggesting that history is already on their side. It implies that the hard work is simply to keep pushing the same message until the laggards catch up. This is comforting. It is also dangerous, because it discourages the much harder work of policy design, coalition-building, and institutional reform that real progress requires.

The gay marriage movement won an extraordinary victory under conditions that do not apply to immigration: an ingroup seeking recognition rather than an outgroup seeking entry, a costless reform rather than one involving real trade-offs, a judicial pathway to finality rather than an endless legislative grind, and a passionate constituency with direct political voice rather than voiceless people abroad.

Immigration advocates do not need a better version of the marriage equality playbook. They need a different playbook entirely, one built around political compromise and designing policies that earn public support by deserving it. The arc of progress on immigration is not automatic. It has to be achieved by hard work.