One-third of Americans believe the legal immigration numbers should be decreased or reduced to zero, a weekly survey from the Economist/YouGov found.
The survey asked respondents to choose if they believe the number of legal immigrants accepted into the United States each year should be increased, decreased, kept the same, or brought to zero.
Opinions varied; 26 percent said the number of legal immigrants accepted in to the United States each year should not change. However, 26 percent said it should be “decreased,” and nine percent said it should be “reduced to zero.” Another 23 percent said it should be increased.
Opinions also varied along party lines. A plurality of Democrats, 41 percent, said the numbers should not be changed, followed by 33 percent who believe it should be increased. Another 14 percent said it should be decreased.
A plurality of Republicans, 41 percent, said the number should be decreased, followed by 26 percent who believe it should not be changed and 19 percent who said it should be reduced to zero. Only seven percent of Republicans believe the number of legal immigrants accepted yearly should be increased.
Among independents, 24 percent said the figure should not be changed, while 23 percent said it should be decreased, 22 percent believed it should be increased, and seven percent said it should be “reduced to zero.”
The survey was taken November 21-24, 2025, among 1,677 U.S. citizens. It has a +/- 3.4 percent margin of error.
It comes as the Trump administration battles illegal immigration, deporting criminal illegal aliens, while also addressing other America first concerns, such as jobs going to foreign workers.
Vice President JD Vance spoke about the latter during an event with Breitbart News in November, discussing the latest jobs numbers and observing that jobs are going to native-born citizens rather than foreigners – a sharp pivot from the reality under the Biden administration.
“And this jobs report confirms that you have the number of manufacturing hours worked in the economy actually going up. You see, the private sector is really driving this economic growth and is driving the job creation. And this is really important — I know to you, Matt, but really to me — and it’s that we are seeing the job growth go to native-born American citizens,” Vance said.
“And what happened under the Biden administration is to the extent there was any job growth at all, if you looked at the data, almost all of the net job creation in the United States under the Biden administration went to the foreign-born,” Vance explained.
“Now, of course, some of those people are illegal immigrants to the United States, but that means that a lot of the job creation was actually going to illegal aliens who shouldn’t have been in our country,” Vance said, adding, “The best thing that you can say about the Trump economy is that American jobs are going to American workers for a change, and that’s the thing that I’m proudest about with these numbers.”
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Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH), who also participated in the event, added further perspective by noting that the Biden administration gutted the working class by importing ten million-plus foreign workers.
“They brought in millions, 10-plus million foreign workers, caused a housing crisis, caused an insurance crisis, caused a food crisis, then they did all the things that they did during COVID which just created incredible amounts of depression among young people [and] raised the price of automobiles,” the senator said.
