As President Biden and former President Trump head to the US-Mexico border this week ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, a new poll finds that a growing number of Americans consider illegal immigration a “very serious” problem. ”, and a majority supports the construction of a border. Wall.
Republican candidates who want to frame the Biden administration as weak on immigration have repeatedly highlighted it as a major issue in the 2024 election campaign. Biden intends to shift the blame for inaction at the border to his opponent, who helped sink the largest immigration package in Congress in years.
A Monmouth University poll released Monday shows that the opposing messages hold true: 8 in 10 Americans of all parties view illegal immigration as at least a somewhat serious problem. Sixty-one percent of all respondents say it is a very serious problem, up from less than 50% in 2015 and 2019. Among Republicans, 91% see illegal immigration as a very serious problem, compared to 58% of independents and 41% of Democrats. .
“This is not the first year we've seen this, but it's a time when it's gaining momentum,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor of politics and government at George Mason University who studies immigration. “The 2024 election is driving this and the images support one narrative: the politics of fear.”
A Gallup poll released Tuesday reported that a growing share of Americans think immigration is the most important problem facing the country, surpassing government, the economy, inflation and other social problems. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said immigration is the most important issue, up from 20% in January.
“It's a little unusual for a topic like this to be ranked first, because usually it's something like the economy or government. Or, you know, after 9/11 it was terrorism. In 2020, it was COVID. It's usually a dominant theme like that,” said Gallup senior editor Jeff Jones. “So it's quite remarkable that something like immigration overcomes those problems.”
Every month for more than 20 years, Gallup has asked respondents about the most important issue facing the country. The last time respondents chose immigration was in July 2019, when there was a spike in attempts to cross the border, according to the pollster.
The Gallup poll interviewed a random sample of 1,016 adults from across the country. The telephone poll, which was conducted over 20 days this month, has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, according to Gallup.
Twenty-eight percent of respondents to the Monmouth survey reported that they felt illegal immigrants take jobs away from American citizens, while 62% say immigrants take jobs that Americans don't want. Those numbers have remained relatively stable, said Patrick Murray, director of polling at Monmouth University.
“When we started talking about this much more as an issue during the Obama administration… it was the argument that they were taking away jobs that was leading the debate,” he said. “Now the terms of the debate really refer only to crime and chaos in society, and the contribution of illegal immigrants to that.”
One of the cornerstones of the MAGA movement, Correa-Cabrera said, is the perception that immigrants bring violence, drugs and insecurity to the United States. Part of the reason, she said, is that many immigrants come to the United States to escape violence in their home countries.
Still, research has repeatedly debunked the idea that immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes than American citizens.
A 2020 study The U.S. Department of Justice found that immigrants in the country illegally committed crimes in Texas at much lower rates than U.S.-born citizens. Still, the Monmouth University survey found that 1 in 3 respondents believe illegal immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes than other Americans.
“The plot is more about this sense of fear and this urgency for our way of life to be… attacked,” Murray said. “And having that as a spectrum is a very powerful motivator for the Trump wing, in particular, of the Republican Party.”
53 percent of Monmouth respondents support building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 48 percent when the university first asked the question in 2015, amid the heat of the Trump presidential campaign on the issue. Support for the wall fell during his presidency, according to Monmouth polls, to a low of 35%.
“When we literally had a concrete example of what that wall really meant, what it was going to look like and what it was going to do, it started to not get a lot of support,” Murray said. “This is a big change from that point.”
The Monmouth survey sampled 902 adults by telephone over four days this month. It has a margin of error of 4 percentage points, according to the university.
Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant and Trump critic, said Democrats across the country have underestimated the importance of immigration to the American electorate. He referred to Proposition 187, the now repealed California law from the 1990s that denied educational, social and health programs to immigrants in the country without authorization.
“I think the rest of the country is now…going through what we were going through in California 30 years ago, this demographic transformation,” Madrid said. “The force of this issue is much greater and much more powerful than people believe. … That will be the battleground for this campaign.”
Both the president and former president are planning trips to the border in Texas on Thursday to highlight their opposing approaches to immigration, just days before voters in 16 states head to the polls to vote in the primaries.
Trump is planning a stop at Eagle Pass, one of his frequent trips to the border to bolster his campaign. Biden will meet with border agents and discuss the need for new legislation in Brownsville, the Associated Press reported.
The president is considering executive action on immigration after a bipartisan bill failed in Congress earlier this month.
The $118 billion package, which would have toughened and streamlined the asylum application process, was one of the most conservative and comprehensive immigration measures lawmakers had before them in years.
Some Democrats, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, rejected the bill as a ceding to Republican interests. However, after Trump criticized the bill for not going far enough to curb illegal immigration, Republicans in Congress ultimately killed it.
The Monmouth poll found that just under half of the public had heard much about negotiations over the bill, and yet nearly half of respondents said both parties were equally responsible for blocking the bill.
“It's pretty hard to look at what happened and not objectively blame Republicans,” Murray said. “Whether you agree or not with the decision to block it, Republicans in Congress were the ones who blocked this. And yet, that is not reflected in the public's perception of what happened. And I think that's the key: that the immigration issue is a significantly bigger motivating factor when it's not resolved than when it is.”
Although they refuse to negotiate the border bill, the Republicans, on the other hand, contested Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas in a historic move, alleging that the Biden administration official failed in his duty to enforce the border.
“The real problems of the immigration system are not going to be addressed this year,” Correa-Cabrera said. “Unfortunately, electoral politics is in the way of improving the immigration system and fixing it. It needs to be fixed. “It is a tragedy what is happening in the United States.”
