Ipsos Poll: Nearly 8-in-10 Americans Want Immigration Moratorium for U.S.

Almost 8-in-10 Americans want immigration to the United States paused during the Chinese coronavirus crisis as unemployment reaches record levels, a new poll reveals.

A newly released Ipsos poll finds Americans are almost totally unified in their support for pausing immigration in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and mass unemployment.

Overall, about 79 percent of American adults said they want immigration temporarily paused to the U.S. — a policy far beyond just the travel bans that have been implemented on Chinese, Iranian, and European travel to the country by President Trump’s administration.

Support for an immigration moratorium has increased in recent weeks. In early March, when Americans were asked about their support for pausing immigration from high-risk countries, about 76 percent said they supported a pause.

Similarly, 70 percent of Americans said they support grounding all international flights to the U.S. to stop foreign travel into the country while the coronavirus continues taking its toll on major cities like New York City, New York; Detroit, Michigan; and New Orleans, Louisiana.

In early March, just 39 percent of Americans said they supported grounding all international flights — indicating a 31 percent increase in support for grounding all international flights to the U.S. over the course of four weeks.

As Breitbart News chronicled, pauses on immigration are not unprecedented. To the contrary, the U.S. has historically cut all immigration in times of crisis and mass unemployment.

During the Great Depression throughout the 1930s, when unemployment hit nearly 25 percent, legal immigration shot down dramatically as millions were laid off. While millions were left unemployed, between the late 1920s and through the 1930s, legal immigration levels went from 241,700 admissions in 1930 to a century-low of 23,068 admissions in 1933 — the lowest annual level of immigration to the U.S. since 1831, when about 22,000 legal immigrants arrived.

For nearly 15 years, between 1931 and 1945, the U.S. stabilized its legal immigration admissions below 100,000 a year. By 1946, the U.S. had started admitting about 108,000 legal immigrants, and for the next 20 years, from 1947 to 1967, annual admissions did not exceed 400,000.

Despite mass unemployment, annual legal immigration admissions are expected to continue hovering around more than a million in 2020, unless President Trump’s administration executively halts most immigration to keep Americans from competing for scarce work against foreign nationals.

In June 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the president’s control over legal immigration. In Trump v. Hawaii, the court stated that presidents have extraordinarily broad discretion to admit or exclude foreign nationals from the U.S. when they believe doing so is in the national interest.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.