Poll: 80 Percent of Americans Want Merit-Based Legal Immigration, Not Chain Migration

The overwhelming majority of Americans agree with President Trump’s pro-American immigration agenda, saying that legal immigration to the U.S. should be based on skills and merit, rather than the current system based on family ties.

In a new Harvard-Harris poll, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they believe “immigration priority for those coming to the U.S. should be based on a person’s ability to contribute to America as measured by their education and skills—and not based on a person having relatives in the U.S.”

Currently, the legal immigration system to the U.S. prioritizes foreign nationals who have foreign relatives already living in the country. This process is commonly referred to as “chain migration.” As Breitbart News reported, chain migration has imported more than nine million foreign nationals to the U.S. since 2005 and is on-track to bring at least eight million new foreign voters to the U.S. in the next two decades.

The Harvard-Harris poll revealed that Trump’s pleading with the Republican-controlled Congress to pass legislation similar to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act, which would end chain migration while implementing a merit-based immigration system that chooses the most-educated and most-skilled immigrants to bring to the U.S., is extremely popular.

For example, 85 percent of black Americans said they supported a merit-based immigration system, rather than the current flow of chain migration. Another 72 percent of Democrat, former voters for Hillary Clinton agreed that the legal immigration system should be based on skills, not family ties.

Currently, the U.S. admits more than 1.5 million legal and illegal immigrants every year, with more than 70 percent coming to the country through the process of chain migration. Mass immigration to the U.S. has had a detrimental impact on America’s working and middle class, which have seen stagnant wages for decades and continued outsourcing of blue-collar and some white-collar jobs.

The poll found that more than 80 percent of Americans support curbing legal immigration levels, a plan that Trump has endorsed to raise the wages of working and middle-class Americans and stem the current never-ending flow of cheaper, foreign competition that burdens the country’s blue-collar workers the most.