Dissecting Gallup’s New Immigration Poll

Trump’s Policies Have Reduced Americans’ Anxieties Over Immigration. But, Politically, Could He Be a Victim of His Own Success?

Yesterday Gallup released new polling on Americans’ attitudes toward immigration.[1] The headline-grabbing result from the poll was that “nearly 80% of Americans think immigration is good for the country.”[2] Another result found that “30% of Americans want immigration decreased, down from 55% a year ago.”[3]

[source: Gallup, 2025]

Democrats and their allies in the media wasted no time in characterizing these results as a rebuke of President Trump and a massive sea-change for the immigration debate. POLITICO described it as a “U-turn.”[4] The pundit class called it an “absolute bloodbath for Trump,”[5] a “backlash to anti-immigrant fever,”[6] and “really bad news for Republicans.”[7]

But these polling results are actually a sign of Trump’s success on the issue. Americans do not have the same level of anxiety about immigration because Trump’s policies have effectively reversed the excesses of the prior administration.

Under President Biden, there was a massive immigration surge. At its height, border patrol encountered 250,000 illegal migrants every month.[8] Most of these migrants were then paroled into the country, an influx of 2.8 million over the course of Biden’s presidency.[9] Americans experienced the negative effects of an open border more dramatically than ever before, and they responded accordingly in opinion surveys.

According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans saying immigration was a “bad thing” for the country went up every year of the Biden administration, from 19% in 2020 to 32% in 2024.[10] The percentage of Americans saying immigration should be decreased also went up every year under Biden, from 28% in 2020 to 55% in 2024, the highest percentage on record since 2001.[11]

[source: Gallup, 2024]

But, within the first few weeks of his second term, President Trump stopped Biden’s catch-and-release policy, made illegal entrants ineligible for asylum, re-instituted the “remain in Mexico” policy from his first term that Biden had rescinded, and aggressively stepped-up deportations of illegal immigrants in the interior of the country.[12]

The result? Illegal border crossings have dramatically reversed course, going from the highest levels in decades to the lowest levels since the 1960s.[13] Border patrol has encountered less than 9,000 illegal migrants per month since Trump took office, a 97% decrease.[14] The demand to reduce immigration is down because Trump has made remarkable progress delivering on his promise to do just that.

The percentage of Americans wanting to reduce immigration is down compared to the past four years but not compared to the past decade. If we average the results from the last eleven times that Gallup asked the question, between 2016 and 2025, 26% favored increasing immigration, 35% favored keeping immigration the same, and 35% favored reducing immigration. The results from Gallup’s 2025 poll track those historic averages very closely: 26% favor increasing immigration, 38% favor keeping immigration the same, and 30% favor reducing immigration.[15]

Gallup’s own analysts agree with this interpretation: “The surge in illegal border crossings during the Biden administration triggered heightened public concern about immigration and increased demand for stricter enforcement. The Trump administration’s swift and visible response appears to have defused that concern, particularly among Republicans. As a result, Americans’ attitudes on immigration have largely returned to where they stood before the recent border surge.”[16]

Moral of the story? Americans have not made some remarkable shift on immigration. They have merely returned to the pre-Biden status quo.

At least, that is the best-case scenario for Democrats if you put full faith into the accuracy of this poll. There are two variables by which pollsters can manipulate their results – phrasing and methodology. In Gallup’s 2025 poll, both of those variables appear skewed to create a pro-immigration bias. Taking this into account, there are probably more Americans who think President Trump has not gone far enough and would like to see even more aggressive action.

First, the phrasing of the poll’s question(s) has a major impact.[17] In this poll, Gallup asked, “Do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today?” That question tells you virtually nothing from a policy standpoint.

It is akin to asking respondents if food is a good thing or bad thing for their body. There are many kinds of food – meats, vegetables, junk food, fruits, saturated fats – but that poll question asks you to treat them all the same. When forced to generalize, most people would say that food is a good thing because you have given them a binary choice and they need a certain amount of food to survive. But that does not mean that they think all categories of food are good for them. Or that they think eating food in excess is good.

Similarly, there are different kinds of immigrants. Some immigrants arrive legally, possess advanced degrees or in-demand skills, and contribute more to our economy than they receive in government assistance. Other immigrants cross the border illegally, have few skills and little formal education, and/or receive more in government benefits than they contribute. Americans may say they support immigration because we need a certain amount of it to remain economically viable. But that does not mean that they support all categories of immigrant. Or think that we should go back to the levels of immigration that Democrats advocate.

With regard to methodology, Gallup employed a new trick this year that was not present when they asked these questions in the past. Under “Survey Methods,” they admit “The sample includes oversamples of Black and Hispanic adults. The total sample is weighted to represent racial/ethnic groups proportionately to their share of the U.S. population.”[18]

This means that they collected more responses from Black and Hispanic adults than would have been proportional to the population at large. The overall sample size was not large enough to have a statistically significant result for each racial demographic, so they oversampled minority demographics to reach a conclusion about attitudes within those subgroups. Then, when analyzing the population as a whole, they re-weighted those samples, so they did match the racial composition of the nation.

Every time the pollsters pull tricks like this, they rely on assumptions. These assumptions create an added layer of variability that manipulate the data. Gallup does not tell us which figures they use to “re-weight” the oversampled demographics. Or whether they also corrected for other factors like age, gender, and location. If they wanted more respondents from minority demographics, they should have put in the effort to increase the overall sample size, which would have given them more respondents of all races without requiring such manipulation.

What does Gallup find by breaking out the data in this way? Hispanic respondents are more likely to disapprove of the President’s immigration policies compared to the general population. However, they are also more skeptical of immigration than the general population: “With respect to immigration levels, Hispanic adults are slightly more likely than U.S. adults overall to say immigration should be decreased (39% vs. 30%, respectively) as well as to consider immigration a bad thing (25% vs. 17%).”[19] This is a pretty glaring discrepancy, which Gallup’s analysts merely gloss over.

[source: Gallup, 2025]

In summary, this poll is a huge win for Trump on policy. He has succeeded so thoroughly on his immigration promises that the public is no longer anxious about that issue. But this could spell trouble for Trump politically by taking his strongest issue off the table before the midterm elections. Republicans must convince voters that there is still work left to be done – Trump has only removed a fraction of the illegal aliens admitted during the Biden years – and not to turn back the clock to the disastrous policies of the last administration. Otherwise, we risk a short-term Pyrrhic victory whose progress can easily be undone.

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[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx

[2] https://www.thedailybeast.com/nearly-80-of-americans-think-immigration-is-good-for-the-country/

[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/11/trump-immigration-crackdown-poll-00448342

[5] https://x.com/David_J_Bier/status/1943658659042447682

[6] https://x.com/madrid_mike/status/1944084682057904630

[7] Id.

[8] https://homeland.house.gov/2024/06/27/startling-stats-bidens-mass-parole-catch-and-release-agenda-continues-to-fuel-historic-border-crisis-endanger-americans/

[9] https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2025-04-08-OIABSE-JHRG-Testimony.pdf

[10] https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-immigration.aspx

[11] Id.

[12] https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-immigration-executive-orders

[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/us/politics/border-crossings-trump.html

[14] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/migrant-crossings-u-s-mexico-border-historically-low-levels/

[15] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx

[16] Id.

[17] https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/22/politics/poll-questions-analysis

[18] https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigration-abated.aspx

[19] Id.