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Notes -
Western countries didn't exactly vote against mass immigration either, until well into the 2010s. There is a very noisy anti-immigration movement going back to Enoch Powell in the UK and Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, and it has real mass working class support, but it doesn't actually move votes.
Even now, anti-immigration populist parties seem to face a hard cap of 25-30% support and centre-right parties who go into coalitions with them are punished - in other words about 70% of the voters are opposed to anti-immigration populism. (Trump wins because the US system allows you to capture the Presidency with 26% of the vote by winning a close primary and then a close general - in a jungle primary he would get 25-30%).
The British far right and populist right are an electoral irrelevance until UKIP get 16% of the vote in a low-turnout European election in 2004, and the first time a party running to the right of the Tories gets a significant vote share in a general election is 2015 when UKIP get 12.6%. The Tories run an anti-immigration campaign in 2005 (with the slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" and it goes down like a lead balloon. David Cameron includes a pledge to cut immigration to the tens of thousands in the 2010 and 2015 manifestos, but the voters (correctly) don't believe him, he wins anyway, and doesn't cut immigration. Boris gets a landslide in 2019 despite having published policies that imply he will do a Boriswave.
The lack of ballot-box support for an anti-immigration insurgent party is unlikely to be purely because FPTP suppresses it - other third parties get mass support during this period, with the SDP-Liberal Alliance peaking at 25.4% in 1983 and the Greens getting 15% in the 1989 European elections.
So the big picture in the UK is that the Tories don't need an anti-immigration message to win, which is good because they can't effectively use one. And there is no meaningful opposition to their right until Farage, and even Farage doesn't have enough votes to matter until 2024 - his impact on British politics between 2010 and 2024 is driven by the impact of Farage panic on the internal politics of the Conservative Party.
In France, you have a serious anti-immigration party opposing the Gaullists from the right going back to Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in the 1980's, but it's stuck on about 15% of the vote (with very little chance of winning anything under the French electoral system, because the other 85% will hold their noses and vote for anyone-but-FN in the runoff) until Marine Le Pen's 2017 breakthrough.
In the US, socially conservative insurgents (who, among other things, oppose immigration) consistently get about 20% in Republican primaries until Trump. The GOP grassroots are obviously more anti-immigrant than this suggests, but when they get into the polling booth they pull the lever for a GOPe tax cutter.
What does all this mean - the simplest interpretation is that immigration is low salience for normies until well into the 2010s. Talking about the issue (in either direction) is a vote loser even among anti-immigration conservative voters because it implies you don't care enough about the bread-and-butter issues voters care about. The other point is that effective anti-immigration politics is very visibly tied to the failure of traditional centre-left and centre-right parties to offer a positive programme voters could vote for. The best example here is the French Presidential election in 2017, where the traditional two big parties came third and fifth, but you see the same thing happening in the UK (where Boris can only win in 2019 by running against his own party's record in government) and the US (where neither the GOPe nor the Democrats can manage run a replacement-level candidate against Trump).
So the interesting question is the direction of causation. Do centre-left and centre-right parties decline because the public finally means it when they say they are fed up with mass immigration, or does anti-immigration politics exploit a vacuum left by the decline of centre-left and centre-right parties for other reasons? Those other reasons are obvious - some combination of social media-driven negativity and very real policy failures including the 2008 financial crisis and Iraq, with the relative impact depending on how sympathetic you find the old-school politicians.
And? If the idea is that our rulers get to do whatever they want, even if their constituents are against it because "neener neener, you didn't vote hard enough" (even when they clearly did - see the policies under the "fascist" governments of Italy, Poland, or the recent DIGNIDAD Act), then it's time to stop pretending "democracy" as a concept has any substance to it at all.
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