Donald Trump’s aggressive and wide-reaching immigration-enforcement agenda has convinced increasing numbers of adults that the US is no longer a welcoming country for outsiders, a new poll has found.
About six in 10 respondents to the Associated Press-NORC poll, conducted last month, say the country used to be a great place for immigrants, but no longer is.
Another one-third said they or somebody they knew personally had been affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown in the previous 12 months, rising to about 60% of Hispanic adults.
Almost half of the Hispanic adults who responded said they had started carrying proof of their US citizenship or permanent residence for fear of being detained or deported by federal immigration agencies.
The wide-ranging poll paints a damning portrait of how opinions have changed in the 14 months since Trump returned to the White House and embarked on his long-threatened “largest deportation operation in US history”.
Trump surged thousands of immigration agents, sometimes backed by the US military, into several cities and states to round up and detain those in the country illegally, often with violent results.
In separate incidents in Minneapolis in January, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two unarmed US citizens protesting against the government’s actions, were shot and killed by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers.
“It’s just plain wrong,” Reid Gibson, 72, a retiree in Missouri, said in his response to the poll. “This is not a good country for immigrants any more.”
The survey found that only a quarter of adults still believed the US was welcoming to immigrants, while about one in 10 believed it never was.
A question about birthright citizenship, which Trump has attempted to remove by an executive order blocked by federal courts and currently under deliberation by the justices of the US supreme court, brought a mixed response.
Overall, 65% believe that all children born in the US should be entitled to citizenship regardless of their parents’ status, and 75% believe the same for children whose non-citizen parents are legally present in the US on work visas.
But only 49% think that should be the case for children born in the US to parents in the country illegally. Trump’s executive order seeks to limit US citizenship to those who have at least one parent who is already a citizen.
The AP said it found that Democrats were more likely than independents or Republicans to know someone affected by the Trump crackdown, and those with a personal connection are more likely to say the US is no longer a great place for immigrants.
Kathy Bailey, a 79-year-old Illinois Democrat, said she had seen the administration’s immigration policies seep into the small-town swim class she regularly attends. She said two women in the class, both naturalized US citizens, had started carrying their passports when they left home.
Bailey said one of the women, from Latin America, was especially worried about sticking out in an overwhelmingly white community.
“She’s an American citizen now, but she’s so scared that she has to carry her passport,” Bailey said. “She’s just another sweet old grandmother swimming at five in the morning.”
Nick Grivas, 40, said his grandfather’s immigration from Greece two generations ago made him more conscious of Trump’s policies, and that he believed the US stopped being a promising place for people seeking a new life.
“We can see how we’re treating children and the children of the immigrants, and we’re not viewing them as potential future Americans,” Grivas, a resident of Massachusetts, said.
He said he thought new arrivals would be deterred from investing in their local communities if they feared deportation.
“You’re less willing to commit to the project if you don’t think that you’re gonna be able to stay,” he said.
