GOP Voters: Reducing Immigration More Important than Paul Ryan's Tax Cuts, Repealing Obamacare

Republican voters say reducing overall immigration to the U.S. is more important than tax cuts or repealing and replacing Obamacare.

It is considered the most important issue facing the country, along with terrorism and national security, making it vastly more important than taxes and the national debt.

Alhough House Speaker Paul Ryan’s brand of Republicanism has focused largely on talking up the benefits of tax reform and cutting entitlements to reduce the national debt, GOP voters see immigration and national security — which is directly tied to immigration — as their biggest issues.

In a new Harvard-Harris poll, 42 percent of Republican voters said immigration was the most important issue facing the country. The same amount of Republicans said national security, too, is the most important issue.

Meanwhile, only 25 percent of Republican voters said the national debt was the biggest issue in the country, while only 12 percent of Republicans said the same of taxes.

Reducing immigration was a bigger priority for GOP voters than tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, getting the U.S. out of the Iran Deal, destroying ISIS, and expanding family leave.

Immigration is so important to Republicans that it even surpassed the economy and jobs as being the biggest issue.

Supporters of President Trump’s say reducing immigration should be the second biggest priority for the White House, just after stimulating American jobs.

Ryan’s wing of the GOP is set to make the case in the 2018 midterm elections that Republicans have delivered on tax reform for voters and need to keep the majority in the House and Senate to repeal Obamacare, despite the party already failing to get rid of the nationalized healthcare program.

Healthcare, like taxes, is not nearly as important to GOP voters as immigration, with less than 30 percent saying it is the biggest issue in the country.

The poll follows months of surveys showing how unpopular mass immigration is with not only GOP voters, but with Americans as a whole.

In February, a similar poll showed that reducing immigration was more important to GOP voters than repealing and replacing Obamacare and destroying ISIS. Another poll revealed that swing voters in the upcoming midterm elections say immigration is more important than tax cuts.

Trump’s pro-American immigration agenda, wherein he wants to cut legal immigration in at least half to raise the wages and quality of life of America’s working and middle class, fell on deaf ears with the Republican leadership. Instead, the GOP focused all their attention on passing tax cuts, an issue that is not a priority for voters.

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 known as “chain migration,” whereby naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S. In the next 20 years, the current U.S. legal immigration system is on track to import roughly 15 million new foreign-born voters. Between seven and eight million of those foreign-born voters will arrive in the U.S. through chain migration.