In 2024, of course, immigration is very salient. Trump and his party have put enormous focus on immigration and on President Biden’s handling of the border as the election draws closer. So it’s worth asking: How do Hispanic voters view the issue?
The answer is fairly straightforward. Recent polling suggests that those voters view it in much the same way as Americans overall — not necessarily in the same way that Democrats do.
YouGov released polling conducted for the Economist this week measuring the extent to which Americans viewed certain issues as very important to their vote. Immigration ranked eighth out of 15 issues presented to respondents, but third among Republicans.
A third of Democrats said immigration was a very important issue. Eight in 10 Republicans did. About half of all respondents did, as did about half of Hispanics.
Asked to identify the most important issue in the campaign, immigration ranked second overall. (The distinction here is between evaluating each issue individually, shown in the graph above, and identifying one issue out of the 15 that is most important.) It was the issue most commonly identified as most important by Republicans and near the bottom of the list for Democrats.
For Hispanic voters? Second, just like respondents overall.
YouGov also asked people to evaluate whether they approved of Biden’s handling of a subset of the issues, including immigration. Hispanic voters, like respondents overall, viewed Biden’s handling of all nine issues more negatively than positively. That includes immigration, which was among the four issues of the group that Hispanics were least likely to identify as very important.
Notice that immigration saw the fewest Democrats identify it as “very important,” it was also the issue on which Democrats gave Biden the least net approval. There is a reason that Republicans are focusing on it so heavily.
Fox News polling, conducted in several swing states, shows that this pattern exists at that level, too. Immigration is one of two issues on which voters in those states — and Hispanics — think Trump would do a better job than Biden. The Hispanic numbers are generally in line with overall responses, skewing slightly more favorably to Democrats.
There are a lot of notes of caution that might be applied here. Among them is the one that applies consistently to analyses of this year’s contest: It is broadly unusual overall and seems, according to other polling, to be perhaps unusually dependent on the question of who turns out to vote.
If it was the case that Trump fared better among Hispanics in 2020 because fewer Hispanic voters were voting in opposition to his immigration policies, polling suggests that Trump may have a different advantage this year: relatively modest opposition to those policies.
