The group of Republican senators lobbying for more legal immigration to the United States is increasingly among the party’s fringe, a survey released Friday revealed.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as well as Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), John Thune (R-SD), and Mitt Romney (R-UT) are currently negotiating a deal with Senate Democrats to increase legal immigration levels by 50,000 green card admissions annually.
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Some of those new green cards would go to foreign nationals solely because of their ties to family members already living in the U.S. while the rest would help businesses import more foreign workers for white-collar American jobs.
Already, the U.S. imports more than a million legal immigrants every year on green cards — 70 percent of whom arrive through the process known as “chain migration” where newly naturalized citizens can sponsor an unlimited number of foreign relatives for green cards.
Likely Republican voters, though, have told pollsters for decades that they want legal immigration levels reduced, not increased.
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The latest Rasmussen Reports survey shows that 65 percent of Republican voters want current legal immigration levels cut down to at least 750,000 admissions a year. Half of those Republican voters said they want to see levels reduced by more than half.
Similarly, 72 percent of Republican voters said they oppose chain migration and more than 6-in-10 Republican voters said the U.S. labor market does not need any more foreign workers to fill American jobs.
Figures from the Census Bureau suggest that immigration is driving nearly all U.S. population growth and that if legal immigration is not reduced, the population will hit an unprecedented 400 million by 2060.
Most Republican voters, 51 percent, said immigration-driven population growth should be slowed while 26 percent said the U.S. should stop immigration-driven population growth entirely.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.