Sixty-seven percent (67%) of voters want asylum seekers detained or deported. A Scott Rasmussen national survey found that total includes 35% who believe they should be detained either in the United States or Mexico and 32% who believe they should be immediately deported.
Another 32% believe asylum seekers should be released into the United States and asked to return for a court hearing.
The results suggest that voters are divided into three roughly equal groups. One group wants asylum seekers deported, one wants them detained, and one wants them released into the U.S. pending a court date.
Those who want asylum seekers detained are evenly divided between whether they should be detained in the United States or in Mexico.
Forty-nine percent (49%) of Democrats believe asylum seekers should be released into the United States. That view is shared by 30% of Independent voters and 18% of Republicans.
There is a significant difference between progressive Democrats and traditional Democrats on this issue. Among those who prefer policies like those of Bernie Sanders, 58% believe asylum seekers should be released into the United States. That number is 37% among those who prefer more traditional Democratic policies.
The survey also found that 73% of voters believe legal immigration is good for the United States while 75% believe illegal immigration is bad.
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Note: Neither Scott Rasmussen, ScottRasmussen.com, nor RMG Research, Inc. have any affiliation with Rasmussen Reports. While Scott Rasmussen founded that firm, he left more than seven years ago and has had no involvement since that time.
Methodology
The survey of 1,200 Registered Voters was conducted online by Scott Rasmussen on September 30-October 2, 2021. Field work for the survey was conducted by RMG Research, Inc. Certain quotas were applied, and the sample was lightly weighted by geography, gender, age, race, education, internet usage, and political party to reasonably reflect the nation’s population of Registered Voters. Other variables were reviewed to ensure that the final sample is representative of that population.
The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 2.8 percentage points.
