A record share of Americans see illegal immigration as a “critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,” and the issue ranks as the No. 1 most important problem facing the country, according to a new poll published Tuesday by Gallup.
Fifty-five percent of Americans now say that large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally present an acute threat to the country’s interests, up from a previous high of 50% set in 2004. Americans also now rank immigration as the most important problem facing the country today, marking an 8-percentage-point increase from January, according to Gallup.
Gallup
“While many Americans regard the economy, generally, or inflation, specifically, as the most important problem facing the U.S., far more name immigration,” wrote Gallup senior editor Jeffrey Jones in an article accompanying the data. “Immigration now sits alone at the top of the most important problem list, something it has done only occasionally in Gallup’s trend and not since 2019.”
The shift in opinion comes amid a record surge of illegal migration at the southern U.S. border that has scrambled the debate over immigration reform and motivated President Joe Biden to plan a visit to the border on Thursday.
Biden will travel to Brownsville, Texas to meet with U.S. Border Patrol, law enforcement and local leaders, and push for Congress to take up a recent bipartisan proposal that would have allocated more than $20 billion to improve border security and made it more difficult for migrants to stay in the U.S. by claiming asylum.
Senate Republicans blocked the deal for not going far enough to stop migrants from crossing the border, claiming asylum and then being released into the country while their cases await adjudication by immigration courts.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, has said that anything short of the immigration bill House Republicans passed last year, H.R. 2, will not solve the problem and will be rejected.
The bill would include drastic changes to asylum laws that could run afoul of both U.S. treaty commitments to protect asylum rights and the Constitution, which provides due-process protections for citizens and noncitizens alike.
Democrats say that Republicans are refusing to compromise in order to keep the issue alive and to help the election prospects of likely Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Trump came out against the bipartisan compromise, arguing in a post on Truth Social that changes to immigration law are not “necessary to stop the millions of people … that are pouring into this country,” and asserting that during his presidency he “had the safest and most secure border in U.S. history” without the changes being sought by the bipartisan bill.
Illegal border crossings during Trump’s presidency were not as frequent as they are today, but in 2019 they were at a then 11-year high and significant enough that then commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Kevin McAleenan described the U.S. immigration system as “well beyond capacity” and “at the breaking point.”
“The Congressional Budget Office predicted that by 2033, the labor force will grow by 5.2 million workers, mostly due to immigration, and that this growth will add $7 trillion to U.S. economic output.”
The economic and investment implications of the ongoing border surge may be significant, given that Citizen and Immigration Services approved more than 2 million applications for employment authorizations last year, a more than 70% increase from the record 1.2 million granted in 2022, according to an analysis by J.P. Morgan Asset Management chief global strategist David Kelly.
“The biggest macro impact of the migrant surge should be in labor supply,” he wrote in a Monday note to clients. “The more than 2 million approved applications for immigrant work authorization in fiscal 2023 suggests that the Labor Department may be undercounting the current growth in the labor force by more than a million people per year.”
He argued that the surge could continue to put upward pressure on housing costs as many U.S. metro areas are suffering from a lack of affordable housing, but also slow wage growth in sectors like construction, leisure and hospitality, and healthcare and social assistance, where immigrant labor is more prominent, putting downward pressure on inflation.
The overall economic impact of immigration may be slightly deflationary because immigrants, with their limited income, don’t increase aggregate consumer demand as much as they increase the supply of labor, Kelly said. But the most important impacts of immigration, he argued, are social and political.
“The current surge in immigration is chaotic, putting additional strains on border states and big cities, leaving many migrants in very difficult personal circumstances, and fomenting further political division,” he wrote. “Clearly, the nation urgently needs comprehensive immigration reform to address these issues.”
Higher rates of immigration may help offset the effects of slowing birth rates in the U.S., according to a recent report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which said GDP growth in 2023 was faster than expected in part because immigration grew the labor force more than it had initially projected.
The CBO predicted that by 2033, the labor force will grow by 5.2 million workers, mostly due to immigration, and that this growth will add $7 trillion to U.S. economic output.
