It's hard to imagine an issue with less grassroots support than immigration. It suppresses wages, drives up cost of living, destroys social cohesion, makes public transit unusable and increases crime and everyone knows and can see this.

You must have been interacting with them in a context where they feared social repercussion, because we're long past the point where even the gullible can be convinced that immigration isn't a problem because everyone has seen the damage caused in real time and the white youth today sees the writing on the wall that we have no future and the best we can hope for is dying homeless in a street covered in trash and human shit or a quick execution. Even the race deniers can't deny that these people are a problem.