A plurality of Americans say immigration is making the country “Worse off.”
The polling data reveals a large 28-point shift since late 2019 in public judgment about the value of the government’s decades-long policy of pulling economic migrants into Americans’ society.
Thirty-five percent of the respondents said immigration makes the United States “Worse off,” while 31 percent said immigration makes the U.S. “Better off,” according to the July 23-26 poll of 1,500 citizens.
“The number of Americans who believe that immigration has made the United States worse off has nearly doubled in less than three years, while the percentage who thought it made America better off dropped by nearly a quarter,” noted Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who now works with the Center for Immigration Studies. He added:
What could account for that change? The most obvious explanation is [President Joe Biden’s] migrant surge that has created a national-security and humanitarian catastrophe at the Southwest border.
In a prior YouGov poll in September 2019, the “Worse off” number was 19 percent, and the “Better off” number was 43 percent.
The 2019 to 2022 turnaround adds up to a 28-point shift in views.
In both polls, 37 percent picked “Not sure” or “Doesn’t make much difference.”
YouGov.com
The same pro-American shift is seen in other polls as Biden open the southern border to a huge wave of roughly two million migrants. That wave is pressuring down Americans’ wages, pushing up their rents, and reducing workplace investment.
For example, Gallup reported on February 8 that just 27 percent of Americans want immigration raised, while 38 percent want migration reduced. That is a 12-point shift since January 2019, when those numbers were almost level at 30 percent and 29 percent.
An April 2021 survey by the pro-migration Bipartisan Policy Center found a 19-point shift from a 2020 poll. “The share of adults who say immigrants hurt the United States’ long-term economic recovery from COVID-19 has increased from 25% to 40% (+15%) since May of 2020,” the center said. The “help” numbers dropped from 28 percent to 23 percent.
The YouGov poll showed that Hispanics split evenly — 32 percent for “Better off” and 30 percent for ‘Worse off.”
YouGov’s top-line numbers also show the deepening polarization between President Joe Biden’s corps of pro-migration progressives and the GOP’s expanding base of American-solidarity voters.
For example, YouGov asked respondents if they would “Support More Immigration — Even if it means it is harder for other workers to get raises.”
YouGov.com
Fifteen percent of all respondents said they would “strongly” back wage-cutting migration. That 15 percent included 23 percent of Democrats, 28 percent of liberals, and 23 percent of voters who backed Biden in 2020.
In contrast, wage-cutting migration is backed by just nine percent of Republicans, eight percent of conservatives, and seven percent of Trump’s 2020 voters.
On the other side of the issue, 23 percent of all respondents strongly oppose wage-cutting migration.
That “strongly oppose” group included just 20 percent of Democrats, nine percent of liberals, and 12 percent of Biden voters.
But it also included 40 percent of Trump voters, 39 percent of Republicans, and 38 percent of conservatives.
The”strongly” numbers are politically important because they suggest that the issue shapes the voters’ voting choices.
If GOP dares to try, there is plenty of opportunity for the GOP to grow the “strongly oppose” numbers by pushing a pocketbook message against immigration to the “somewhat oppose” and “somewhat support” subgroups.
For example, the potentially gettable “Somewhat support” group includes 24 percent of all respondents, 24 percent of independents, and 20 percent of Democrats.
The weak “somewhat support” cohort could also be shifted by a pocketbook pitch. That group includes 21 percent of all voters, 29 percent of Democrats, and 18 percent of independents.
But threats from deep-pocketed donors have caused GOP leaders to deny any recognition of migration’s pocketbook costs.
The leaders’ defensiveness coexists with their eagerness to talk about the pocketbook damage of inflation and wages. For example, GOP’s chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel conspicuously dodged any mention of migration’s pocketbook costs in her August 10 article touting the GOP’s 2024 convention in Wisconsin:
From skyrocketing prices, to rising violent crime and deadly drugs pouring through an open border, to indoctrination in our kids’ classrooms, Democrats have let the American people down at every turn.
…
Republicans offer a different vision. We want to cut your taxes, not raise them, and we will unleash American energy to drive down costs at the pump. We will always support our police, hold criminals accountable and give law enforcement the tools they need to keep our communities safe. We want parents to have a role in their kids’ education and to ensure that young students aren’t bombarded with radical and inappropriate curriculum.
But she did include a pro-migration dog-whistle to her party’s donors:
Above all, Republicans celebrate America because we understand that this nation is — and always will be — the shining city on the hill that the rest of the world looks to as an example of freedom and opportunity.
In the YouGov poll, the respondents’ income did not shape the “strongly” answers to the question about wage-cutting migration.
For example, people who earn under $50,000 per year split 15 percent “Strongly Support” vs. 25 percent “Strongly Oppose” when asked about wage-cutting migration. The support and opposition numbers were exactly the same among the Americans who earn $100,000 or more.
But the poll showed sharp divisions between blue-collar and white-collar respondents.
Wage-cutting migration was strongly supported by 9 percent of white K-12 graduates and by 16 percent of white college grads. It was strongly opposed by 29 percent of white K-12 graduates and 21 percent of white college graduates.
The poll did not provide enough detail to show if some of the white college graduates would be swayed to back the GOP in exchange for a promise to curb the Fortune 500’s visa programs that are gutting segments of the white-collar professional sector. Some GOP legislators have begun defending white-collar Americans from the Fortune 500’s use of visa workers.
Extraction Migration
The policy of Extraction Migration is central to the U.S. economy. The policy extracts human material — migrants — from poor countries and uses them as workers, renters, and consumers to shift vast wealth from ordinary people to billionaires and Wall St.
Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of legal and illegal migrants — plus temporary visa workers — from poor countries to serve as workers, managers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs.
This policy of labor inflation makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to get married, advance in their careers, raise families, or buy homes.
Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to boost stock prices by using cheap stoop labor instead of productivity-boosting technology.
Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. The flood of cheap labor tilts the economy towards low-productivity jobs and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force.
An economy built on extraction migration also drains Americans’ political clout over elites, alienates young people, and radicalizes Americans’ democratic civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
The economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by European-origin civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of competitive, resentful identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times in March 2022. “It will be an extraordinary achievement … we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted.
Business-backed progressive advocates hide this Extraction Migration economic policy behind a wide variety of noble-sounding explanations and theatrical border security programs. So progressives claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that migration is good for migrants, and that the state must renew itself by replacing populations.
Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration — but they also show the deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This “Third Rail” opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that American citizens owe to one another.
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