Bipartisan Poll Shows Failure to Deliver Citizenship Will Result in Significant Enthusiasm Gap with Voters
By Evangel Penumaka and Prerna Jagadeesh
As we approach the end of President Biden’s first 75 days in office and look ahead to the beginning of the 2022 midterm election cycle, it is crucial for Democrats to pass policy that motivates voters to turn out for them in the upcoming elections. One policy area that generates huge enthusiasm among voters? Immigration — specifically, providing citizenship to undocumented immigrants.
In new national polling from Data for Progress in partnership with We Are Home Action, we find that voters across parties and racial and ethnic groups support pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and in particular to DACA recipients and essential workers. Notably we find that voters want and expect Democrats to move forward on these reforms — and Democratic voters say that humane, citizenship-granting immigration policy is a key reason they voted Democrat in the first place.
Our polling reaffirms extremely strong support for a multitude of proposals providing citizenship to undocumented immigrants. Notably, voters across the ideological spectrum support an eight-year pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who pass a background check by a +44 point margin — Democrats by a +64 point margin, Independents by a +43 point margin, and Republicans by a +19 point margin.
Providing a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients by passing the Dream Act was met with similarly stratospheric popular support. Voters favor this proposal by a +47 point margin, including +72 Democratic support, +48 Independent support, and +16 Republican support. The fact that even a majority of Republicans support these proposals indicates that the electorate is united in wanting the Biden administration to pursue a humane immigration policy towards our most vulnerable immigrants.
Further, voters indicated that they have the backs of undocumented immigrants who have kept our society running during the COVID-19 pandemic — by a +39 point margin, voters overwhelmingly support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are essential workers. Voters also support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers in agriculture by a +35 point margin.
We also found that voters support a humane, citizenship-granting approach to immigration policy more than they value Republican buy-in on Democratic immigration legislation. By a margin of +4 points, voters want to pass citizenship-granting legislation for undocumented factory workers, farm workers, and child care providers “as soon as possible so that no one gets behind, even if [these policies] only have support from Democrats in Congress.” Most voters don’t care how bipartisan immigration legislation is — they want it done, with or without Republican support.
We next examined how important seeing immigration reform passed was for respondents that indicated they voted for a Democrat in the 2020 election cycle. We found that an overwhelming majority of voters said that immigration reform was important in their decision to vote Democratic: 80% of voters said ending family separations was important to their decision to vote Democratic, and 72% of voters said the same about a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. It’s clear that Biden and Congressional Democrats pursuing a humane, citizenship-granting immigration policy is crucial to keeping voters in the Democratic tent.
The fact that voters prioritize immigration reform is further reinforced by how they say they’ll react if immigration reform doesn’t get implemented. We asked this same set of voters which of two statements comes closer to their view: “If Democrats don't pass immigration reforms like the Dream Act, I'll understand because there are other issues that need their attention” or “If Democrats don't pass immigration reforms like the Dream Act, I'll be disappointed because this is a failure to deliver on policies they ran their campaigns on.” A majority of voters said they’d be disappointed if Democrats fail to pass the DREAM Act, by a margin of +14 points.
Americans are counting on Democrats to pass humane immigration reform, and with the 2022 midterm elections fast approaching, it would be unwise for Democrats to let them down. Our polling shows strong, broad-based support for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants of multiple different constituencies, and it also shows that a crucial part of the Democratic political identity is strong support for a humane immigration policy. Voters have made it clear that Democrats’ immigration plans are a major selling point with them — now, it’s up to Biden and Congressional Democrats to pass these crucial and urgently necessary reforms.
Methodology
From March 17 to March 19, 2021, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1189 likely voters nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, and voting history. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error is ±3 percentage points. NB: subgroups with a n-size less than 50 (<50) are not shown on these cross-tabs.
We choose not to display N<50 subgroups because the sample is too small to have statistical significance. We did, however, take samples of these subgroups for representational and weighting purposes to accurately reflect the electorate makeup. Some values may not add up to 100 due to rounding.