Americans are Increasingly Worried About Immigration and National Identity, Poll Shows
By Laura Santhanam Feb 7, 2024 5:00 AM EST
For a majority of Americans, the United States’ openness to people from all over the world remains essential to the fabric of the nation. Yet, just as Congress wages a battle over the border and the future of immigration, support for that bigger idea has been eroding, according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll.
Welcoming others makes the country what it is, 57 percent of U.S. adults said in this poll, including 84 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents. That’s a significant downward shift in attitudes since July 2021, when 66 percent of U.S. adults supported openness to others.
Meanwhile, 42 percent of Americans overall – including 72 percent of Republicans – said they felt that if the U.S. is too open, it runs the risk of losing its identity.
Republican leaders on Tuesday declared the $118.3 billion immigration deal dead, after months of negotiations between the White House and Senate. All eyes are on whether the bill can get the 60 votes it needs Wednesday in a key procedural step in the Senate.
This has frustrated bipartisan negotiators and some Democrats, who argue this is a rare opportunity to advance immigration reform. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden told Congress to “show some spine” and pass a deal.
“Our laws are entirely out of date,” said Doris Meissner, senior fellow and director of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program. “Congress has been entirely missing in action for decades.”
The funding package includes about $20 billion for enhanced border security, $2.3 billion to assist refugees within the U.S., as well as $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine and $10 billion in humanitarian assistance (including for Gaza). It also would prompt a massive overhaul of the nation’s asylum system
Under the bill, asylum seekers would have to offer clear and convincing evidence to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers that they are in danger and that they face the reasonable possibility of harm if they are returned to their country of origin.
Many voters do not understand what’s needed to address complicated issues within immigration, Meissner said. Current immigration laws do not match the needs of the U.S. economy, its labor market or an aging society, she added. People who wish to legally establish their lives in the U.S. often must wait for years, spending thousands of dollars and jumping through countless legal hoops before they are granted green cards or citizenship.
When asked in this poll who was better at handling issues of immigration, the largest share of Americans – 41 percent – named the Republican Party. Another 29 percent said Democrats did a better job of managing this issue. Overall, another 10 percent said one party was as good as the other on immigration, and 20 percent of Americans said neither party did a good job – a sense of dissatisfaction that has grown substantially over nearly two years. That group included almost a third of independents.
However, when Americans were asked more generally about the performance of Congress, significantly more people disapproved of Republican lawmakers – the party that currently controls the House – than the Democrats. Among national registered voters, 66 percent disapprove of how Republicans in Congress are doing their job, while 53 percent of registered voters felt that way about Democrats.
On Tuesday, Biden blamed former President Donld Trump for pressuring Republicans to vote against the legislation.
Trump would “rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it,” he said in remarks from the White House. “For the last 24 hours, he’s done nothing, I’m told, but reach out to Republicans in the House and the Senate and threaten them and try to intimidate them to vote against this proposal. And it looks like they’re caving. Frankly, they owe it to the American people to show some spine and do what they know to be right.”
Biden’s handling of immigration gets poor marks from 60 percent of U.S. adults. That includes 90 percent of Republicans, 66 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats. According to Marist polling data, this latest disapproval number marks an 11-percentage point surge since July 2021, when that question was last asked.
At the same time, 29 percent of Americans said they approve of Biden’s leadership on the issue, including 55 percent of Democrats.
Chart by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour
Ramping up border security to reduce illegal crossings was the biggest immigration issue in this poll, seen as the top priority by 41 percent of Americans. Another 14 percent said the U.S. should increase deportations of people who entered the country illegally. At the same time, 28 percent said it’s most important to them that individuals who entered the U.S. illegally as children should be allowed to stay in this country, and 15 percent said the U.S. should take in refugees fleeing violence and war.
The United States is not the only country facing a rising demand from people migrating to its borders, Meissner said, and those demands will only increase. With the worsening effects of climate change exacerbating poverty and living conditions within failed states, desperation will drive more people from their homes and communities.
“We are in a new era of migration pressures, but it’s not only on the United States,” Meissner said. “It’s global.”
What voters think about the 2024 presidential race
If November’s general election were held today, national registered voters were about as likely to support Biden as they are to vote for Trump. In this latest poll, 48 percent said they would vote for Biden (whose approval has remained virtually frozen for months), while another 47 percent said they would back Trump – a margin that has remained virtually unchanged since August.
However, if Trump were convicted of committing a crime, his support slid significantly, with 45 percent of registered voters staying by his side and 51 percent of registered voters throwing their support behind Biden, according to this poll.
Chart by Jenna Cohen/PBS NewsHour
Another thing that has changed little over the last year: 73 percent of Americans think Trump has done something either illegal or unethical. A majority of Americans – 54 percent – said the investigations into Trump’s actions are fair and designed to uncover whether he broke the law. Another 45 percent call these investigations unfair and feel they obstruct his 2024 presidential reelection campaign.
These latest polling data illustrate that “Americans are obviously very divided,” said Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Trump’s candidacy alongside persistent legal troubles are unprecedented, and it is unclear even to political experts how voters will behave if the ex-president is convicted of a crime or is on trial during the election in November, Walter said.
“Having better electability doesn’t mean you get elected. That argument falls short with a lot of base voters.
“I don’t know if we can say with much certainty how voters are truly going to react if this becomes a reality,” she said.
Among national registered voters, a match-up between Biden and Republican candidate Nikki Haley was a statistical dead heat, with 46 percent of U.S. voters supporting the incumbent president and 45 percent supporting Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina. Overall, 10 percent of potential voters said they were undecided between the two – a higher number than for Biden vs. Trump.
In the increasingly unlikely event that Haley clinches the GOP nomination, 39 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they were somewhat or very concerned about Haley being too extreme to win a general election. In contrast, 26 percent of those same respondents said they had some degree of concern about Trump being too extreme to win in November.
“The Republican base backs Trump,” GOP strategist Douglas Heye said. “That’s what that number tells us.”
Heye said he was not surprised by these latest poll results.
While Haley offers Republicans “their best shot at winning” the general election, many Republican voters still feel burned after their party lost the White House through the support of more centrist nominees, he said, including Sen. John McCain in 2008 and Sen. Mitt Romney in 2012.
“Having better electability doesn’t mean you get elected,” Heye said. “That argument falls short with a lot of base voters.”
The PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist Poll conducted a survey on Jan. 29 through Feb. 1 that polled 1,582 U.S. adults with a margin of error of 3.4 percentage points, 1,441 registered voters with a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points, and 601 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents with a margin of error of 5.5 percentage points.
Left: A fifth of Americans said neither the Republican nor Democratic parties did a good job in handling immigration, a sense of dissatisfaction that has worsened in recent years, according to the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll. Photo by Qian Weizhong/VCG via Getty Images