3 - Functional Assimilation, Humanitarianism, and Support for Legal Admissions

Summary

There is little doubt that, in the abstract, Americans are wary about the number of immigrants coming into the United States.¹ Gallup began asking in 1965 whether the level of immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same. For most of the last half century, support for increasing immigration hovered in the single digits or low teens. As of 2019, it has never exceeded 30%.² Wariness about rising levels of immigration is evident even when surveys clarify that they are asking about legal rather than illegal immigration, a distinction to which we return at length in Chapter 4. For example, a Fox News³ poll conducted in April 2013 asked a national sample “Do you think the United States should increase or decrease the number of LEGAL immigrants allowed to move to this country?” The majority, 55%, said the number should be decreased, compared to 28% who said it should be increased, with 10% volunteering that the number should not be change and 7% unsure. These numbers were little changed from earlier polls conducted in 2007 and 2010, though other time series do show marked increases in support for preserving and even increasing legal admissions in the last several years.⁴ Despite recent rises in public support for increasing immigration and drops in support for decreasing it, Peter Schuck’s pithy phrase remains true of a broad cross-section of the public: “Americans do not oppose immigration in principle, in general, or unalterably, but they do want less of it (or at least no higher).”⁵