A national poll taken just before Pres. Trump endorsed the RAISE Act in a White House event on Aug. 2 found overwhelming support for the bill's central feature -- reducing legal immigration from around one million a year to around a half-million.
Pulse Opinion Research surveyed 1,000 "likely mid-term voters" on July 24-25 and asked them how many legal immigrants should be allowed each year. The firm stated that the results had a margin of sampling error of only 3 percentage points,and had a 95% level of confidence.
"Likely mid-term voters" were defined as those who answered a question saying they "always" or "usually" vote in mid-term congressional elections in which there is not a presidential contest.
According to the poll, here are the percentages of those American voters who support the following seven options of how many legal immigrants should be added to the United States each year:
24% -- NONE
22% -- 250,000
16% -- Half a million
14% -- One million
03% -- One and a half million
02% -- Two million
04% -- More than two million
14% -- Not sure
In other words, 62% of likely voters nationally say they would prefer cutting immigration at least as much as would the RAISE Act sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.).
Only 14%, choose to keep legal immigration at its current level of one million a year.
And only 9% want to increase annual immigration -- as the Senate Gang of Eight tried to do in 2013. Some of those same "Gang" Senators were quick to the microphones this week to condemn the RAISE Act as being out of touch with the needs of America.
And which America might that be, Senators? Looking at the poll, it is clear that the critics probably have the wholehearted support of between 9% and 23% of likely mid-term voters. At most, that's about the size group of Americans who told the pollster they want NO immigration at all.
But to get in touch with what most of their voters think is needed, the Senators criticizing the RAISE Act might want to spend a little more time talking to their voters and less time talking to the big donors who are happy with the wage suppression caused by the last 27 years of annually giving out a million new lifetime U.S. work permits to foreign citizens.
This was the wording of the POLL QUESTION: "Current federal policy automatically adds about one million new legal immigrants each year, giving all of them lifetime work visas. Which is closest to the number of lifetime immigrant work visas the government should be adding each year?"
ROY BECK is Founder & President of NumbersUSA
