Americans’ support for immigration in the United States is at a record high despite the fact that American voters mere months ago elected a president who ran on enacting the largest deportation operation in the country’s history.
A new poll from Gallup shows that 79% of Americans think that immigration is a good thing for the country, which is the highest number ever recorded in Gallup’s 24-year history of measuring U.S. voters’ attitudes on immigration.
Furthermore, the Gallup poll shows that 85% of Americans now support “allowing immigrants, who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time” and 78% support “allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.”
Support for deporting all undocumented immigrants back to their home countries, meanwhile, garners just 38% support from Americans, which is a drop of nine percentage points from the 47% of Americans who said they supported deporting all undocumented immigrants one year ago.
Voters surveyed in the poll also had decidedly negative views of U.S. President Donald Trump’s handling of immigration, as just 35% approved of how he was handling the issue while 62% disapproved. The numbers get even worse for Trump when it comes to Latino voters, who were a key constituency that Trump made major gains with in the 2024 presidential election.
“At 21%, Hispanic Americans’ approval of Trump’s handling of immigration is 14 points below the national average,” writes Gallup. “With respect to immigration levels, Hispanic adults are slightly more likely than U.S. adults overall to say immigration should be decreased (39% vs. 30%, respectively) as well as to consider immigration a bad thing (25% vs. 17%), but the majority in both cases still express pro-immigration views.”
The low support for Trump’s immigration policies in the Gallup poll is notable because polls in the past have consistently shown that it’s his strongest issue among American voters.
Aggregated polling data compiled by data analyst G. Elliott Morris have consistently shown that Trump has higher approval on immigration than on other major issues, although that support has also fallen over the last several months. Back in February, Trump’s net approval on handling immigration was +10.8 percentage points, whereas today his net approval on the issue stands at -3.2 percentage points.
The new data on immigration comes as the Trump administration has been launching high-profile raids of workplaces suspected of employing undocumented immigrants, including a Thursday afternoon raid of a farm in Camarillo, California that drew significant local protest.
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