Latinos say government is doing a ‘bad job’ at the southern border but disagree with non-Latinos on solutions: Pew

Latinos in a new poll say they think the government is poorly managing migration at the southern border, but they diverge with non-Latino Americans on how they believe the U.S. should respond.

In a Pew Research survey released Monday, approximately three-quarters of Latino U.S. adults (74 percent) said the U.S. government is doing a bad job dealing with the border situation, slightly lower than the 81 percent of non-Latino U.S. adults who share that view.

Latino and non-Latino Americans, however, hold very different views on how the U.S. should respond.

Latinos are more likely (57 percent) than non-Latinos (44 percent) to say the border situation would improve if the U.S. made it easier for asylum-seekers to access work while waiting for their application decision.

Many of the more stringent policy proposals are embraced more often by non-Latino Americans than Latino Americans.

Only 33 percent of Latinos say increasing deportations of people who are in the country illegally will make the border situation better, compared with 23 percent who say it would make the situation worse.

A majority of non-Latinos (55 percent) say increasing deportations would improve the situation, compared with 16 percent who say it would make the situation worse.

A plurality of Latino Americans (43 percent) say they think that substantially expanding the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico would not make much of a difference in the border situation, compared with 26 percent who say it would make the situation better and 15 percent who say it would make the situation worse.

A plurality of non-Latinos (45 percent) say they think substantially expanding the wall would make the situation better, compared with 30 percent who say it wouldn’t make a difference.

Nearly half of non-Latinos (48 percent) say putting more severe penalties on businesses that hire people who cannot legally work in the U.S. would make the border situation better, compared with just 28 percent of Latinos who say the same.

The poll comes amid record-high migration at the southern border, and U.S. voters citing immigration increasingly as a top concern for them in an election year.

Former President Trump, the GOP front-runner, has made immigration a key issue, pledging “mass deportations” and detention camps if he’s reelected.

Both Trump and President Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, traveled to the southern border, where Biden called on Congress to pass legislation to address the border situation.

The Pew survey included 5,140 U.S. adults, including 879 Hispanics. It was conducted from Jan. 16 to 21, 2024, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points.