Immigration Attitudes

For a large majority of Americans, the country’s openness to people from around the world “is essential to who we are as a nation.” In a new Pew Research Center survey, 68% say America’s openness to foreigners is a defining characteristic of the nation, while just 26% say “if America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation.”

Supporters of Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming congressional election are deeply divided over the government’s role in ensuring health care, the fairness of the nation’s economic system and views of racial equality in the United States.

A majority of people in several European countries support taking in refugees. Yet there is widespread disapproval of how the EU has handled the refugee issue.

Americans and Western Europeans have broadly similar views on certain social and political issues. For example, majorities of Americans and Western Europeans see immigrants as beneficial to their economies and support certain rights for gays and lesbians.

About eight-in-ten Twitter users who tweeted about immigration with a link in the first month of the Trump presidency shared at least one tweet that had a link to a news site.

While there has been considerable attention on illegal immigration into the U.S. recently, opinions about legal immigration have undergone a long-term change.

The differences over immigration policy between Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union are also evident among backers of the parties.

Nationalist and anti-immigrant attitudes in Western Europe have been an issue in a number of recent national elections around the region. But Western Europeans vary by country when it comes to having positive or negative views about immigrants and religious minorities.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally when they were children.

As the U.S. is on track to admit its smallest number of refugees in decades, opinions about whether the U.S. has a responsibility to accept refugees have become more polarized.