Polls say voters back “mass deportation.” That's misleading.

This spring, an eye-opening poll from Axios suggested what once seemed unthinkable: Four in 10 Democrats were open to the idea of the US government deporting undocumented immigrants en masse. Though that share of support might seem high, other polls conducted since have found something similar, suggesting Americans at large are open to harsher, more Trumpian immigration policies.

And yet, as attention-grabbing as some of the headlines on support for mass deportations have been (and as Donald Trump and his allies continue to talk about his plans for such), those polls may not accurately capture the mood of the American electorate. Support for a policy of mass deportation, while superficially high, rests on two related complications: substantial confusion among voters about what it might actually entail, as well as a generalized desire to do something — anything — on immigration, which polls frequently report to be among Americans’ top issues.

That disconnect is because standalone polls and headlines do very little to capture the complexity of many Americans’ feelings about immigration, which often include simultaneous, and apparently contradictory, support for more immigrant-friendly policies alongside draconian ones. The real answer, more specific polling by firms like Pew Research Center suggests, lies somewhere in the middle: A good share of voters, it seems, are fine with increasing deportations. Some might even want the kind of operation Trump is floating. But many also want exceptions and protections for specific groups of immigrants who have been living in the US for a while, or have other ties to the country.

I guess that's at least a little better, but goddamn I still don't understand it.