About three-fourths of the public, including a high percentage of Republicans, say illegal immigrants mostly fill jobs that citizens do not want, despite President Trump’s claims that they take jobs from U.S. workers, according to a new poll.
A Pew Research Center study issued Wednesday found that 77% of adults in the United States, including 87% of Democrats and 66% of Republicans, believe illegal immigrants work jobs they are not trying to attain. Among legal immigrants who have documents to live and work in the U.S. for periods of time, 64% of all respondents said they were not in competition for those jobs, the report found.
The findings conflict with messaging from the White House. At the 2019 State of the Union, Trump claimed U.S. citizens were losing jobs to illegal immigrants, who were given jobs because they were willing to work for lower wages.
This spring, amid the economic downturn brought on by stay-at-home orders due to the coronavirus, the Trump administration cut some categories of legal immigration in what it described as an effort to open jobs up to citizens. Trump plans to extend and broaden those restrictions as unemployment numbers remain in the tens of millions five months from the election.
But 32% of Trump’s GOP base believes immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are filling jobs Americans want. Among Democrats, only 11% agree. A higher share of people, 32%, say they would like to have jobs that are filled by legal immigrants.
Employers of foreign workers go through an extensive process to acquire employees from other countries and prove Americans cannot fill vacancies.
As of 2017, roughly 7.6 million illegal immigrants worked in the U.S. — approximately 5% of all U.S. workers. However, immigrants in the U.S. with and without legal permission made up 23% of food industry workers in 2017. Food workers were deemed essential amid the pandemic and have had their jobs spared from furlough and exempted from Trump’s suspension of visas to other foreign guest workers.
Between 20% and 30% of workers in the agriculture, construction, personal/other services, and leisure/hospitality industries are legal and unauthorized immigrants.
The telephone poll was conducted among 10,957 U.S. adults between April 29 and May 5. Among the total respondents, the survey had a 1.4 percentage point margin of error. The margin of error among Republican respondents was 2.1 percentage points and 2 percentage points among Democratic respondents.
