One political issue North Carolinians agree on? Stronger border security, new WRAL poll shows
Most North Carolinians, regardless of their political affiliation, want to see a stronger crackdown at the border between Mexico and the United States, according a WRAL News poll released Thursday.
Forty-six percent of adults statewide say they want to stop all crossings through the southern border. Another 32% say the federal government should take steps to reduce immigration from Central America and South America, but not go as far as a total shutdown. Just 12% said they think immigration policy should remain the same or be made less strict.
Last month Democratic President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump each made trips to the border; Trump is the presumptive GOP nominee for president again this year. Biden is also seeking reelection.
WRAL polling released earlier this week shows most North Carolina voters would prefer not to have a rematch of the 2020 election between Trump and Biden — but that immigration is one of the top issues for many voters statewide, and one that’s especially likely to motivate Republican voters this fall.
The WRAL poll, conducted in partnership with SurveyUSA between March 3 and March 9, has a credibility interval of 4.1 percentage points. A credibility interval is similar to margin of error but takes into account more factors and is considered by some pollsters to be a more accurate measurement of statistical certainty.
When asked their opinion on 10 different topics ranging from the economy to guns or abortion, likely North Carolina voters ranked immigration sixth, according to WRAL polling released Wednesday. When broken down by political party, the poll showed registered Republicans were more concerned about immigration than any other issue — even the economy, which was the top issue for the average voter. More than half of registered Republicans ranked immigration as having the highest possible importance to them, compared with fewer than one in five Democrats.
But when pressed on the issue, Democrats tended to agree with Republicans that stronger border security is needed, according to results released Thursday. The new results show 87% of Republicans said immigration across the southern border should be reduced or totally shut down, as did 71% of Democrats and 77% of unaffiliated voters.
“It looks like this is a winning issue for Republicans,” Western Carolina University political scientist Chris Cooper said of calls for cracking down on immigration. “And it’s not as much of a losing issue among Democrats as, frankly, I thought it might be.”
National Democrats appear to be reaching similar conclusions. Biden’s trip to the border last month was one of several ways the president has been embracing a more conservative approach to immigration as he seeks reelection — despite having campaigned in 2020 on undoing some of Trump’s immigration policies, such as taking migrant children from their families at the border and sending them to live others.
Biden also backed a bipartisan U.S. Senate proposal that would have set daily limits on border crossings. House Republicans shot down the proposal under pressure from Trump. Democrats are now planning to campaign to reelect Biden by emphasizing that Republicans caused the deal to collapse.
The U.S. Border Patrol set a new record in December, arresting almost 250,000 migrants at the southern border, the most of any month on record. Typically migrants are temporarily detained by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol before being expelled back across the border, granted asylum or facing some other legal fate. The number of border crossings dropped off in January, which the Border Patrol attributed to efforts by Mexican authorities to stop migrants from other countries before they reached the U.S. border, the Associated Press reported.
Pew Research Center data show border crossings were almost as high in the early 2000s, under the George W. Bush presidency, as they are now. Crossings fell during the Barack Obama presidency. They then spiked in the early years of the Trump presidency but fell to almost nothing during the Covid-19 pandemic. They have been steadily rising since Biden took office in 2021.
In North Carolina it’s unclear if Biden’s recent shift to the right on immigration could hurt him. The Associated Press has reported that, nationally, some left-leaning immigration advocates are unhappy.
WRAL polling shows that immigration policy isn’t a big priority for Hispanic voters, who in the past have been more sympathetic toward people living in the country without authorization. The economy, the environment, guns, health care, mental health, education and international affairs all ranked higher on their list of top issues.
Hispanic voters make up about 4% of all voters in North Carolina — a small group, but one that could still be influential in a state Trump won by just 1.5% of the vote in 2020.
Immigrant workers in the NC economy
The North Carolina Department of Commerce says immigration is necessary to keep the economy running.
A 2023 report found that since the state’s population is steadily getting older, and because Americans in general are having fewer children, “immigration will serve an increasingly critical role in supporting the labor force and bolstering North Carolina’s economic trajectory.”
The strong opposition to immigration from Central and South America is particularly notable in North Carolina, where the No. 1 industry — agriculture — is heavily reliant on immigrant labor from those parts of the world. About half of the foreign-born population in the state comes from Latin America, according to Census data.
During Trump’s last year in office in 2020, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates, two-thirds of all crop-farm workers in the U.S. were foreign-born, and most of them weren’t in the country legally. That’s a sharp rise from the early 1990s when less than 20% of such farmworkers were estimated to be unauthorized immigrants.
Some farming businesses find migrant workers by word of mouth; others rely on organized operations. In 2014 federal prosecutors levied dozens of criminal charges against a Moore County business and its founder, who was accused of running a massive visa fraud scheme to provide North Carolina farmers with cheap migrant labor — eventually resulting in a guilty plea and $600,000 fine.
The political arm of that operation, the Growers Association PAC, gave North Carolina Republican politicians tens of thousands of dollars between its founding in 2000 and its closure in 2015.
Agriculture isn’t the only industry that attracts immigrant workers; the tech and biopharmaceutical industries do, too. Statewide, immigrants — whether here legally or not — make up about 8% of North Carolina’s population, up from less than 1% half a century ago.
A state commerce analysis of Census data shows immigrants and naturalized citizens in North Carolina are more likely to be employed or looking for work than native-born Americans, with 68.6% of the foreign-born population participating in the labor force compared with 59.8% of people born in America.
