Over half of Americans believe there are too many immigrants coming into the country at the moment, a new poll shows, as immigration continues to take centerstage in the presidential campaign with less than two weeks to go before election day.
The survey, conducted by the Metropolis Institute, also showed that less than a third of respondents (32%) disagreed with the premise, while the remaining 13% preferred not to answer. The proportion of answers was similar across the country, with Americans living in the Middle Atlantic being the outlier region. There, the amount of people saying there are too many immigrants rose to 60%.
Looking at age groups, people between the ages of 50 and 64 were the most likely to provide that answer, with 63% of them answering that way. People aged 30 and 39 were the least likely to say there are too many immigrants coming in: 47% of them gave that answer, with 36% saying they didn't think that was the case and 17% declining to answer. The youngest demographic, 18 to 29, was more likely to agree with the premise, as almost half (49%) gave that answer.
Other categories include Americans living in rural areas believing there are too many immigrants in the country at the moment: 64% said it was the case, compared to 53% in suburban areas and 49% in urban areas.
Foreign-born Americans are less likely to agree with the premise, but almost half still believe it is the case. Concretely, 48.6% said so, a majority of respondents compared to 35.1% disagreeing with the premise and 16.2% refusing to answer.
As for ethnicity, almost 6 in 10 White respondents say there are too many immigrants, compared to 43% of Blacks. Over half of Hispanics agreed with the premise: 52%. 34% disagreed and 14% declined to answer.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has been gaining ground in the U.S. during the election cycle, especially as Republican candidate Donald Trump pledged to conduct the largest deportation in U.S. history if elected for a second term.
During his presidential campaign, he anticipated he would invoke wartime means to achieve this, proposing the use of military-guarded encampments to round up and deport undocumented immigrants – an idea almost half of Americans and most conservatives support.
Another poll, the 2024 American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, found that 50% of Americans opposed the idea of setting encampments, while 47% favored it.
When analyzing demographics, Axios found that 79% of Republicans favored putting undocumented immigrants in encampments, compared with 47% of independents and 22% of Democrats.
Support for undocumented immigrant encampments increased among Americans who trust far-right news, with 91% of them supporting the idea, followed by 82% of Fox News viewers and 44% of Americans who do not watch TV news.
Trump's presidential campaign is using the growing anti-immigrant sentiment to its advantage, spreading controversial and mostly false claims about immigrants. Most recently, Trump accused Haitian immigrants of eating pets and said immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of the country.
Despite the rhetoric, a recent The New York Times/Siena College poll revealed that most Hispanics in the country don't think the inflammatory statements are directed at them. Two-thirds of those surveyed said they believed Trump was not referring to people like them when he spoke about immigrants, while 50% of foreign-born Latino voters expressed feeling the same way.
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