Most Americans recognize illegal immigration is a big problem — with the majority now supporting a border wall

In one of his first acts in office, President Joe Biden halted construction of the wall along the southern border. In the months since, over 7 million foreign nationals have stolen into the United States, incentivized further by Democratic sanctuary policies, open-borders rhetoric, and discussions of rewards for those who have already flouted immigration laws.

The majority of illegal aliens rely on taxpayer-funded welfare, with every million parolees siphoning $3 billion in federal welfare benefits. The estimated annual cost to house known gotaways and illegal aliens released into the country under Biden's watch is $451 billion. Multitudes of foreign nationals are tracking in diseases once thought eradicated or controlled in the U.S. along with violent crime, including of the kind that claimed Laken Riley's life last week.

Americans are apparently fed up — including a fair share of Democrats.

The latest Monmouth University poll revealed Monday that public concern over illegal immigration has skyrocketed during the Biden administration's mismanagement of the border crisis. Over 8 in 10 Americans recognize illegal immigration to be either a very serious (61%) or a somewhat serious (23%) problem.

Broken down by political affiliation, 66% of Republicans, 42% of independents, and 33% of Democrats told pollsters in 2015 that illegal immigration was a very serious problem. Nine years later, those figures jumped to 91%, 58%, and 41%, respectively.

"Illegal immigration has taken center stage as a defining issue this presidential election year," said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. "Other Monmouth polling found this to be Biden's weakest policy area, including among his fellow Democrats."

For the first time since Monmouth pollsters started asking the question nationally in 2015, the majority of Americans (53%) now support the construction of a border wall, while 46% signaled continued opposition to securing the border with such a barrier.

When the question was first posed in September 2015, 48% of respondents signaled support for the wall. During the Trump administration, support for the wall reached 44% at its highest and fell to 35% at its lowest.

In 2015, support for the wall among Republicans stood at 73%. It has since increased to 86%. There has also been a spike in support among independents, from 47% to 58% over the past nine years.

While there has been an overall increase in concern over the border among Democrats, their support for a border wall has actually slipped from 31% to 17%.

Support for keeping those foreign nationals claiming asylum in Mexico has increased among all partisan groups since 2019. Now, 61% of Americans think they should wait to be processed on the other side of the border. This desire for remote processing may have been driven by increased concerns about criminality.

Roughly one in three (32%) Americans reckon illegal aliens to be more likely to commit violent crimes like rape or murder. This represents a 11-point increase over the 2019 poll and a 15-point jump over the response in 2015.

In their latest attempts to displace blame over the border crisis, Democrats have suggested that Republicans threw away a winning remedy by opposing the so-called border bill. According to the Monmouth poll, Americans weren't convinced the bill would have done a great deal in the way of addressing the crisis.

47% of respondents said the border bill was "not tough enough when it comes to dealing with illegal immigration." 77% of Republicans and 48% of independents were in agreement.

"These results illustrate why the border deal was dead on arrival. The vast majority of rank-and-file Republicans and many independents believe it is too soft on illegal immigration, even if they don’t know exactly what's in the legislation. Senate GOP leadership could have tried to sell the bill, but that would have almost certainly been fruitless once Donald Trump weighed in against it," said Murray.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 7,332,800 foreign nationals stole across the U.S. southern border illegally between the time Biden took office and last month.

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