Voters Overwhelming Support Pathway To Citizenship Over Mass Deportation

Addressing the myth of mass deportation’s popularity. News outlets including Axios, citing the Harris poll, and Newsweek, citing the CBS/YouGov poll, have made recent headlines touting the popularity of mass deportation policy. But do those results accurately reflect public sentiment on the policy? This memo, citing new polling from the Immigration Hub, shows mass deportation remains an unpopular solution to handling undocumented immigrants in the United States. Importantly, providing a pathway to citizenship and/or legal status to the undocumented is the far more popular solution, validated by both new polling from The Immigration Hub and external public polling from Pew Research.

Key Findings

When framed as a choice, voters prefer a pathway to citizenship over mass deportation by a large margin. Providing a pathway to citizenship remains the far more popular approach to handling undocumented immigrants. On behalf of the Immigration Hub, Global Strategy Group and BSP Research recently conducted a poll in battleground states and found that by a 22-point margin, voters prefer a pathway to citizenship over mass deportation. Among the Hispanic sample, that margin is 64 points and even a majority of Republican Hispanics prefer the pathway to citizenship approach.

Pew Research finds that while support for mass deportation has increased among Republicans, it remains far below a majority with the full electorate – supported by only 37% of the public. While Pew’s headlines focus on the small bump in support for mass deportation, it’s important to be clear about one thing: their data says only 37% of the country supports “a national effort” to deport the undocumented. According to Pew, support for mass deportation is up 11 points over the last 3 years, but it’s up 14 points with Republicans (to 63% with GOP voters) and only 5 points with Democrats (to 11% with Democratic voters). This shift with Republicans is hardly surprising given Trump and the Republican party’s increasing focus on nativist policies, but a policy supported by less than four in ten Americans is hardly a political winner.

Our internal polling shows that when voters are given specifics about who would be deported, they prefer allowing people to stay over being deported by overwhelming numbers. In an April poll conducted by Global Strategy Group and BSP Research for Immigration Hub in the same 2024 presidential battleground states, majorities of voters support allowing undocumented immigrants who fit the following criteria to stay in the country:

• Those who are regularly employed and paying taxes (73% of voters overall say all/most should be able to stay in the U.S., 20% say all/most should be deported; 76% stay, 19% deport among Hispanic voters)
• Those who are married to a U.S. citizen or legal resident (73% stay, 18% deport overall; 78% stay, 17% deport among Hispanic voters)
• Those who are Dreamers, who came to the United States as children (69% stay, 21% deport overall; 76% stay, 20% deport among Hispanic voters)
• Those who have passed a background check and have no criminal record (69% stay, 25% deport overall; 77% stay, 18% deport among Hispanic voters)
• Those who are family caregivers to a spouse/child who is a citizen/legal resident (68% stay, 22% deport overall; 76% stay, 17% deport among Hispanic voters)

Those other polls showing mass deportation having majority support are getting there with unusually high numbers with Democrats and Hispanics – but neither we nor Pew are seeing that in our data. The Harris Poll says 51% support mass deportation, and the CBS/YouGov poll has it at 62%. Both of these polls are showing around four in ten Democrats, and around half of Hispanics supporting such a policy. As can be seen on the table on the following page, this is a far different story in our own data, which shows 11% of Democrats and 22% of Hispanics support mass deportation.

Why the difference? It’s how you ask the question. The culprit is likely something that the survey research industry calls “acquiescence bias”. In this post, Pew Research explains that asking agree-disagree or support-oppose questions, as Harris and CBS/YouGov do on mass deportation, can lead to an overstatement of the number of people who actually support them. Pew explains that “a better practice is to offer respondents a choice between alternative statements” as “less educated and less informed respondents have a greater tendency to agree with such statements.” This phenomenon is likely happening on mass deportation polling, where many voters are being asked whether they support a policy they may not fully understand. But when given the choice, as in our poll and the Pew poll, the voters’ true underlying beliefs on the issue come out more clearly.