President Donald Trump's immigration policy is even popular with Hispanics, according to a new survey. The poll of likely midterm voters conducted for NumbersUSA finds that 62 percent of Hispanic voters support a reduction in legal immigration to the U.S. Currently, the U.S. admits between one and 1.5 million legal immigrants per year, but President Trump supports a plan to cut that number to less than a million per year. Overall, nearly 65 percent of all voters surveyed in the poll support reducing legal immigration levels.
The findings did not come as a complete surprise to NumbersUSA President Roy Beck. "You're talking about Hispanic-Americans who are engaged, and their results are very similar to the results for likely midterm voters of all ethnicities," he tells KTRH. In particular, Beck isn't surprised because Hispanic communities are more likely to be hurt by continued mass immigration. "Hispanic-Americans will disproportionately live in the same communities where the next wave of foreign workers move into," he says. "This poll shows that Hispanic-Americans are looking at immigration in a sense of what their self-interest is."
Another finding of the survey did catch Beck off guard: that Hispanics don't support a bill to legalize DACA recipients without major concessions in other areas. "These Hispanic-American voters were strongly against a legalization of 'Dreamers' that doesn't mandate e-verify at the workplace, and that doesn't cut legal immigration from a million a year," he says. "That was surprising to me."
Beck hopes that politicians will heed the lessons of this survey heading into this year's elections. "Republicans that want to hold the House this fall would probably be better off, according to this poll, if they focused on these labor force issues, and immigration is a labor force issue," he says.