Nearly twice as many Democrats and more than double the number of Republicans who said illegal immigration was a “very big” problem last year now believe that to be the case.
The polling data from the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, released on Thursday afternoon, show mounting concern about the southern border situation is a bipartisan trend, which is certain to add pressure on the Biden administration to address it.
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Forty-eight percent of the more than 5,109 people surveyed in the poll from April 5-11 said they believe illegal immigration to be a very big problem, while 29% characterized it as a “moderately big problem,” and 19% considered it to be “a small problem.” Only 3% of respondents said they wouldn’t consider it a problem at all.
Nearly three-quarters of the Republicans surveyed in the poll, 72%, said they believe illegal immigration rises to the category of a “very big” problem, which is a 29-point increase since the last iteration of the poll in June 2020. Twenty-nine percent of Democrats said they would classify it as a “very big” problem, which is up from 15% last year.
The percentage of people in June 2020 who classified illegal immigration as a “very big” problem was only 28%, the lowest it reached in any Pew Research poll dating back to Oct. 2016.
Pew said the margin of sampling error for the full sample of 5,109 respondents was 2.1 percentage points.
There has been an increase of migrants traveling to the southern border since the Biden administration took over, though defenders note the total had been going up in the final months of the Trump administration.
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Federal officials say more than 100,000 migrants were encountered at the border in February and more than 172,000 in March, and reports indicate an unprecedented 117,000 migrant children are set to enter the U.S. by the end of the year.
