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I think an issue with the immigration discourse, much like the abortion discourse, is that it's dominated by philosophical extremes, partially because that's who puts the most effort into the issue, when most people tend to be somewhere in the mushy middle. Abortion is dominated by people who either think life begins at conception, or close to it, and everything after it is unjustifiable homicide or people who believe in basically absolute bodily autonomy for the woman and that the fetus has no interests we should take into account at any stage. Most people tend to thing there are some abortions that are morally permissible, life of the mother being the least controversial example, others that are morally gray or not really a public issue, like an early stage abortion for lifestyle, and some that are outright wrong, such as Kermit Gosnell's abortions.
I think immigration has a similar structure; you have people who are either outright for open borders, or are de facto pro open borders, on one side and philosophical nativists who view immigration as bad in itself, which the bad only sometimes being outweighed by the virtues of the individual immigrant in certain cases, on the other side. Most people instead balance a lot of different factors, such as cultural assimilation, economic benefits, economic detriments, crime, and other factors when debating if immigration is good or not. Compare Ukrainian refugees/immigrants vs. Syrians; the Ukrainians tend to be benefits to the host societies, while the Syrians tend to be detriments. You can see Europeans react to this fact by one being far more controversial than the other.
A lot of political behavior on both Abortion and Immigration, really the rest of the culture war too, is describable by individual issues often being a ratchet. Red states and blue states on issues like guns and abortion are able to add up individual decisions which on their own aren't necessarily too objectionable into de facto banning certain actions, or at least making them incredibly difficult. Immigration is often the same way; letting in immigrants our economy needs is generally popular when you phrase it like that, but once you start fiddling with the definition of 'what our economy needs' or 'genius' or the help they get when they are here things get contentious quite quickly.
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