Hispanic voters say the U.S. government should do more to enforce immigration laws, according to new polling data.
An exit poll conducted by Rasmussen Reports and NumbersUSA found that more than half of Hispanics who voted in the 2022 midterm elections agree that the government isn’t doing enough to reduce illegal immigration.
The survey asked Hispanic voters if the government is doing “too much” or “too little” to “reduce illegal border crossings and visitor overstays.” Among the 515 respondents, 57% said “too little,” while just 16% said “too much,” 17% said “about right,” and 11% said they weren’t sure.
Specifically, even among Democratic Hispanic voters surveyed, 49% said they thought the government was doing “too little” to reduce illegal crossings at the border.
“These results don’t surprise me,” Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Wanting a secure border and an orderly, fair migration process with some limits is like asking for safe streets and lower crime—a sensible and mainstream point of view,” Hankinson said. “Counting on Hispanic Americans as a permanent bloc vote against commonsense policies is a poor long-term strategy.”
However, the Brookings Institution’s Gabriel Sanchez said that 64% of Latinos reported “that they voted for a Democratic House candidate, compared to 33% who reported they voted for Republican candidates” in the 2022 midterms.
In October alone, Customs and Border Protection reports its agents encountered 230,678 illegal aliens along America’s southern border.
The Rasmussen Reports survey also asked Hispanic voters: In an effort to “control illegal immigration, how important is it to greatly increase the physical barriers, such as walls and fencing, on the U.S. border with Mexico?”
The poll found that 47% of Latino voters think that walls and fencing are “very important” to limit illegal immigration, and an additional 19% of Hispanic voters surveyed said walls and barriers are “somewhat important.”
When it comes to policies related to illegal migrants’ access to jobs in America, 56% of survey respondents said they “favor immigration policies that prevent illegal border crossings and illegal immigrants from getting jobs in the U.S.”
Jim Robb, NumbersUSA vice president of operations, said the “poll and recent election results show that immigration and border policies that protect American workers is increasingly attracting Hispanic voters.”
If Republicans “want to continue to make gains among Hispanic voters,” he said, they need to “continue to stay strong on immigration and border security, while the Democrats need to move to more restrictive immigration policies. Hispanic voters are not different from other voters. They want strong, secure borders and immigration policies that protect American workers’ jobs and wages.”
The poll also asked Latino voters whether they support “policies that increase legal immigration” into America. Results show that 43% said they support policies to increase legal immigration into the U.S., while 46% said they support policies to reduce legal immigration.
In addition to asking Latino voters their views on immigration policies, the survey also asked about their approval rating of the current president.
While 47% of Hispanic voters say they approve or somewhat approve of President Joe Biden, 51% said they either strongly disapprove or somewhat disapprove of the president.
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