Eighty-one percent of Americans want one million or fewer legal immigrants to the United States per year, according to new polling datareleased Monday by the Harvard-Harris poll, a number lower than the 1.38 million who came to the United States in 2015.
The plurality of respondents, 35 percent, think that there should be between 1 and 250,000 legal immigrants arriving to the United States per year. A net 12 percent want to see immigration increased to 1.5 million people per year or more, while nine percent of Americans think that there should be no new legal immigrants.
Plurality preference for between 1 and 250,000 new immigrants a year persists across white, Hispanic, and black Americans, as well as moderates and self-identified Democrats. Such a rate of immigration would be lower even than the rate expected from the RAISE Act, a bill backed by the administration and expected to cut immigration in half in ten years.
These results are part of a broader pattern among a public that, according to the poll, is critical of President Donald Trump’s performance on immigration policy but broadly sympathetic to the White House’s agenda in that domain.
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