Survey Says is a weekly series rounding up the most important polling trends or data points you need to know about, plus a vibe check on a trend that’s driving politics or culture.
Federal immigration agents gunned down two Americans in Minneapolis in January. Ostensibly, those agents were there to carry out deportations, a centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. After all, 72% of voters said immigration played a big role in casting their ballot that year.
But all of this—those votes and those bullets—is based on the fake problem of immigration.
Nineteen percent of Americans say immigration is the “most important problem” in the U.S., according to Gallup. That puts it ahead of inflation (11%) and “the economy in general” (17%). Even if you combine all economy-related items, immigration is seen as the nation’s third-most pressing issue, behind only that motley of economic concerns (35%) and “the government/poor leadership” (26%). This is a common result across public polling.
Perhaps for some of these Americans, the trouble with immigration in the U.S. is the country’s onerous path to citizenship or Trump’s brutal deportation actions. They wouldn’t be wrong. But that’s not what most of these people are thinking of. Most see immigration itself as the problem. In 2024, Trump won 89% of voters who ranked immigration as their top issue, according to exit polls.
The thing is, immigration has no downsides that aren’t dramatically outweighed by its benefits. And the core concerns around immigration are typically based on egregious lies.
President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Colorado in 2024.
Objections to immigration tend to rely on the false notion that immigrants are more prone to crime. Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump held rallies featuring headshots of immigrants who had allegedly committed crimes. At a rally in Colorado, he said his Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, “has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world. And she has had them resettled, beautifully, into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
After he won that year’s election, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security tried to tie falling crime rates—part of a yearslong trend—to his deportation agenda.
“These arrests and deportations of criminal illegal aliens are having real impact on public safety,” DHS claimed in a statement.
Trump alone has hit on the idea of a crime wave among immigrants more than 575 times recently, according to the Marshall Project.
But this narrative is false. In fact, the data is so overwhelming that it’s hard to know where to begin.
How about incarceration rates? A 2025 study by the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are far less likely than native-born Americans to wind up behind bars. In every year of their data, which spanned 2010 through 2023, the incarceration rate for undocumented immigrants was between 31% and 56% below that for native-born Americans. Among legal immigrants, it was even lower: between 65% and 75% under the rate for native-born Americans.
As it turns out, this disparity in incarceration rates has been true for the past 150 years of American history, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research. And it’s remained true even as the nation’s undocumented population has ballooned, hitting an estimated 14 million in 2023.
As the Cato study’s authors put it, “[A] general mass deportation policy indiscriminately targeted at all illegal immigrants will not reduce crime rates, nor will reductions in legal immigration.”
In fact, it may do the opposite. A higher share of immigrants in a population has either no effect on rates of lethal violence or is associated with lower crime rates overall, according to a literature review included in a fresh study in the Journal of Criminal Justice. The reason for this is that new immigrants often settle in disadvantaged communities, supplying those areas with new economic activity and other types of social stability, like solid family structures and good work ethics.
Three children play where the U.S.-Mexico border wall meets the Pacific Ocean in February 2025 in Tijuana, Mexico.
And despite Trump’s hysteria about foreign drug traffickers, research shows that larger immigrant populations may actually decrease local overdose deaths. One study from 2022—aptly titled “More immigrants, less death”—found that “immigration is not associated with higher levels of overdose or homicide deaths, and when effects are significant, immigration is linked to lower levels of overdose mortality across multiple substances and destination types.”
In social science, this research is part of what’s known as the immigrant revitalization thesis.
But Republicans, unaware of or undeterred by the evidence, are skilled at manufacturing a crisis where one doesn’t exist. A few months ahead of the 2024 election, 48% of Americans said they personally worry about illegal immigration “a great deal,” per Gallup.
And yet, as Trump acts on his big anti-immigration agenda, it has been a bust. On Jan. 18, the administration tried to claim that 70% of the immigrants it had detained were violent criminals, which is nowhere close to the truth.
Between Jan. 20 and Oct. 15 last year, just 7% of immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement had a violent conviction, according to a New York Times analysis. Several thousand others face charges as minor as a traffic violation. And one-third of those arrested had no criminal record whatsoever.
If immigrants make communities safer overall, as the evidence suggests, you have to wonder what will happen to those communities after the immigrants have been disappeared.
Any updates?
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Two new polls have Democrats at high risk of locking themselves out of the governor’s mansion in California. The state has a jungle primary, meaning all candidates, regardless of party, run in one primary, and the top two vote-getters in that primary advance to the general election. As I wrote in December, the sheer size of the Democratic field has split the vote too much, with polls showing the race’s two Republicans leading. And now a pair of new polls, one for the left-leaning group California Environmental Voters and the other for Democratic candidate Katie Porter, show that very same thing—but with slightly larger leads for the Republicans.
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ICE is expected to provide security at this year’s Winter Olympics … in Italy. If that sounds bizarre and unnecessary to you, you’re not alone. A majority of Americans (51%) oppose the idea, with just 33% supporting it, per YouGov.
Vibe check
This feels like a turning point, doesn’t it?
This past Tuesday, just a few days after federal immigration agents executed intensive-care nurse Alex Pretti, YouGov asked Americans the following question: “At various times, there have been turning points in American politics, where things could have gone in a very different direction. At other times, things that seemed important turned out not to be significant. What does this moment feel more like to you?”
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say we’re at “a significant turning point” in American politics. Just 13% say it’s “not too significant,” while the remaining 22% are unsure.
That feels dramatic. That feels big. But the unfortunate truth is that those figures are basically no different from any other time YouGov has asked the question in the past year and a half.
Sixty-five percent said the nation was at a turning point the day after a gunman nearly assassinated Trump in July 2024. But was that moment really a turning point? Trump was already leading then-President Joe Biden in polling for that year’s election, with the Biden campaign’s own data showing Trump on track to pick up 400 electoral votes. Even after then-Vice President Kamala Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, her loss was foretold by the fact that the vast majority of incumbent parties in democracies lost elections that year.
A photo of Alex Pretti, who was fatally shot by federal immigration agents, is displayed at the shooting scene on Jan. 26 in Minneapolis.
Of course, turning-point moments do happen: World War II, Watergate, 9/11, so on. And people responding to these polls could read “this moment” as a broader span of time, perhaps one encompassing the entire Trump era. Still, a lot of political moments that feel like a sea change come up short.
And yet this data may also tell us more about what people want a political moment to represent and less about what they actually believe it does.
Which brings us back to Minnesota. Federal immigration agents, high on a cocktail of power, cruelty, and disregard for human life, unjustifiably killed a mother of three and a nurse who treated injured veterans. Confronted by such tragedies, we want the magnitude of their horror to be matched or even outweighed by the change they inspire, the good they bring. We want all this suffering to mean something.
