Poll: Just 15% of Voters Have ‘Very Positive’ View of Migration

Pro-migration activists are admitting there is little public support for business plans to import more foreign workers and renters.

The admission comes as Democrats call for amnesties and giveaways in Congress’s lame-duck session before the GOP takes control of the House in January.

Only 28 percent of registered voters believe immigration has been positive for their local economy, and only 38 percent say immigration is good for the United States, according to an August 12-15 survey of 2,025 registered voters conducted for a pro-migration advocacy group.

The poll admits that only 15 percent said they have a “very positive” view of national migration, and 20 percent said they have a “very negative” view.

The survey by the Economic Innovation Group (EIG) tested questions to maximize apparent public support for migration and relied on a poll that skewed sharply Democratic. For example, only 43 percent of the poll’s respondents said they would back the Republican Party in the pending midterms.

In the November result, the GOP won a clear majority of the votes and a bare majority of House districts. Fourteen percent of Republican voters said immigration was their top issue, ahead of crime, abortion, and guns.

The EIG advocacy group is backed by investors who want to import more white-collar migrants and inflate housing prices in states far from the coasts. Their migration policy would shift wealth from ordinary American families to coastal investors in California and New York.

The EIG poll showed 28 percent of Americans say migration has a negative impact on their communities and that 36 percent say it has a negative impact on the United States.

The EIG poll also tested language to maximize apparent support for migration.

But those careful questions failed to show much support. For example, only 14 percent said they were “much more likely” to support a political candidate to “supported allowing more skilled immigration.” Eight percent said they were much less likely to support such a candidate.

The group argued that the apparently low numbers show that business groups can raise public support for more migration:

Ultimately, only 56 percent of respondents believe that immigration has either a positive or negative impact on their local economy, which provides an opening for stakeholders, advocates, and policymakers to make a positive local economic case for immigration, such as by demonstrating that it can help declining areas shift to growth again.

But a recent study by a pro-migration advocate suggests that opposition to migration moves many more votes than support for migrants.

Alexander Kustov at the University of North Carolina wrote:

I find that compared to pro-immigration voters, [pro-citizen] voters feel stronger about the issue and are more likely to consider it as both personally and nationally important. This finding holds across virtually all observed countries, years, and alternative survey measures of immigration preferences and their importance. Overall, these results suggest that public attitudes toward immigration exhibit a substantial issue importance asymmetry that systematically advantages [pro-citizen]  causes when the issue is more contextually salient.

…

even when the public support of pro-immigration policies is seemingly greater than or similar to that of anti-immigration policies in the raw poll numbers, it is likely the case that the anti-immigration side is still more politically motivated and influential.

Pro-citizen “anti-immigration voters always care more,” Kustov wrote at Medium.com in October:

According to my analysis of the American National Election Studies and the Voter Study Group polls, compared to those who support immigration, those who oppose it feel more strongly about the subject and are more likely to see it as having both personal and national importance. Furthermore, when the issue is receiving more media attention, this pattern becomes particularly pronounced.

Following Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, for example, those who supported restricting immigration were much more likely to rank it as the most important issue facing their nation (27% vs 16%). The same asymmetry was 4% vs 2% in 2012, when immigration was less prominent at a national level. The comparable figures in 2020 were 17% vs 12%. Even in 2020 — the year with the highest pro-immigration polling numbers ever recorded — there may have been fewer supporters of immigration than opponents among those who actually cared about the issue (4% vs 5% of all respondents).

Numerous polls show that the swing-voting public opposes the continued inflow of wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrant workers and consumers. For example, a 52 percent majority of American swing voters believe Democrats put the interests of migrants ahead of Americans, while Republicans put Americans first, according to a late October CBS poll of 2,119 registered voters.

Many polls show the public wants to welcome some immigration, but the polls also show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into the jobs needed by the families of blue-collar and white-collar Americans.

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.

Extraction Migration

Government officials try to grow the economy by raising exports, productivity, and the birth rate. Those strategies are difficult and slow, and so officials also try to expand the economy by extracting millions of migrants from poor countries to serve as extra workers, consumers, and renters.

This policy floods the labor market and so it shifts vast wealth from ordinary people to investors, billionaires, and Wall Street. It also makes it difficult for ordinary Americans to advance in their careers, get married, raise families, buy homes, or gain wealth.

Extraction migration slows innovation and shrinks Americans’ productivity. This happens because migration allows employers to boost stock prices by using stoop labor and disposable workers instead of the skilled American professionals and productivity-boosting technology that earlier allowed Americans and their communities to earn more money.

This migration policy also reduces exports because it minimizes shareholder pressure on C-suite executives to take a career risk by trying to grow exports to poor countries.

Migration undermines employees’ workplace rights, and it widens the regional economic gaps between the Democrats’ cheap-labor coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states.

But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy kills many migrants. It exploits the poverty of migrants and splits foreign families as it extracts human resources from poor home countries to serve wealthy U.S. investors.

So far, progressives have not apologized for their civic and economic wreckage. “I’m not going to change anything in any fundamental way,” President Joe Biden told a November 9 post-election press conference.