Most Americans support southern border wall — as 61% call illegal immigration ‘very serious problem’: poll
A new poll shows for the first time that a majority of Americans support building a wall along the US-Mexico border — while three-fifths of the country sees illegal immigration under President Biden as a “very serious” problem.
The Monmouth University survey released Monday found 53% of respondents favor building a border barrier while 46% say they are opposed.
By contrast, 60% of Americans told the same pollster in September 2017, months after former President Donald Trump took office, that they were opposed to a border wall and just 35% said they were in favor of construction.
When the question was most recently asked, in April 2019, support for a border wall had risen to 42% among US adults while opposition had dwindled to 56%.
The last time more Americans supported building a wall than opposed it was in September 2015, when 48% said they were in favor and 43% were opposed.
Additionally, 61% of Americans said they view illegal immigration as a “very serious problem,” with another 23% saying it is “somewhat serious,” compared with just 15% who believe the issue is “not too serious” or “not at all serious.”
A majority of Republicans (91%) and independents (58%) agree that unlawful immigration poses a “very serious problem,” while 41% of Democrats say the same.
“Illegal immigration has taken center stage as a defining issue this presidential election year,” Monmouth pollster Patrick Murray said in a statement. “Other Monmouth polling found this to be Biden’s weakest policy area, including among his fellow Democrats.”
Democratic support for building a southern border wall, however, has fallen 14 percentage points in the past nine years — despite it being the only Trump-era immigration policy that Biden has followed in any form.
Since taking office, the president rolled back his predecessor’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and Title 42, a pandemic-era mandate to immediately expel migrants who entered illegally from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The Monmouth poll found that 61% of Americans back “Remain in Mexico,” known officially as the Migrant Protection Protocols, which required asylum seekers to await immigration court hearings south of the US border.
A majority of Republicans (86%) and independents (60%) also favor that policy — and only 35% were against it, including a majority of Democrats (54%) who prefer asylum seekers be allowed into the US ahead of their court dates.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has called on Biden to reinstate the policy.
The Senate failed to pass new border security legislation earlier this month as part of a broader $118 billion emergency supplemental funding bill with military aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
The upper chamber voted through a subsequent $95 billion bill without border provisions, which gained a majority of Republicans’ support.
Johnson called the larger bill “dead on arrival” and has so far rejected calls from the White House to put the second piece of legislation up for a floor vote. In the meantime, the House impeached Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, on Feb. 13 on charges of failing to enforce federal immigration laws.
The Senate border bill gave Biden a Title 42-style authority to expel migrants when US border crossings exceed 5,000 per day over a one-week period and overhauled asylum screening standards.
But the Monmouth poll shows a plurality were opposed (33%) to the legislation while just 23% were in support of it — including nearly half of independents — and 45% had no opinion either way.
Almost half of Americans (47%) believed the bipartisan bill negotiated by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), was not tough enough on illegal immigration.
That cohort includes more than three-quarters of Republicans (77%) and about half of independents (48%), with a bare majority of Democrats (51%) saying it was “about right” in terms of border enforcement.
However, only 41% of Democrats said they were in favor of actually moving forward and passing the bill.
“These results illustrate why the border deal was dead on arrival,” Murray noted. “The vast majority of rank and file Republicans and many independents believe it is too soft on illegal immigration, even if they don’t know exactly what’s in the legislation.”
“Senate GOP leadership could have tried to sell the bill, but that would have almost certainly been fruitless once Donald Trump weighed in against it,” he added.
Senate and House Republicans slammed the border bill after its release for giving billions in handouts to non-governmental groups to shelter and settle migrants as well as provide legal counsel to unaccompanied minors with asylum claims.
They also noted that under the proposed law, the US border would never be shut down, since the Title 42 authority could be suspended at any time by the president if he considered it in the “national interest” to do so.
Nearly half (48%) of the Monmouth survey respondents blamed both parties for the failure of the bill , while 36% said Republicans were more responsible and 13% said Democrats were more to blame.
The White House announced Monday that the president would travel to Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday to meet with Border Patrol agents, law enforcement and local elected officials and to renew calls for the bipartisan border bill.
The pressure campaign comes as a Venezuelan national — who was eligible for deportation after facing child endangerment charges last year in Queens — faces new charges this week of murdering a Georgia nursing student.
The case has amplified concerns about an increase in violent crime being linked to the migrant influx, as 7.2 million people have crossed the border since Biden took office and another 1.8 million “gotaways” evaded arrest when entering the US.
The poll found 32% of respondents believe illegal immigrants are more likely to commit violent crimes like rape or murder — an increase of 11% from 2019 and 15% since 2015.
But 39% said illegal immigrants were just as prone to violence as US citizens.
Just 24% said they were less likely to commit such crimes than Americans.
The Monmouth University poll Feb. 8-12 and surveyed 902 US adults, with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 4.1 percentage points.
