To understand Latter-day Saint views on immigration, look at all the data

One stand-out polling lesson from the 2024 election was the danger of over-relying on single surveys, especially when specific findings (Harris ahead in Iowa) depart from generally accepted reality. On sensitive matters, it’s become far too tempting for pundits to seize on an outlier result as evidence for something definitive, while laying aside other details or other data.
This is happening with faith journalism too. For instance, in one survey recently picked up by the media, it was reported that “nearly a third of U.S. Latter-day Saints agree that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the nation.” But that’s not what the survey asked. Respondents were asked whether they support the following: “The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country” (emphasis our own).
The notion of the blood of a country being “poisoned” by any particular group has an unquestionably dark history. Closing paragraphs of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf warn about an “age of racial poisoning” — earlier inveighing against “every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples” (including any Jew who he says “poisons the blood of others”). It was this so-called “blood poisoning” that Hitler argued was the root of “all great cultures of the past perish(ing).”
Observers, therefore, are not wrong to raise concern at any Americans adopting similarly hostile attitudes. Although Americans have generally held positive attitudes toward immigration in recent decades, that has shifted over the past few years, with surveys repeatedly showing most Americans unhappy with the border crisis and immigration surging to the top of Gallup’s “most important problem” list among surveyed Americans. This is especially true of conservatives and people of faith, with Republican concerns over immigration at an “all time high,” according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
But in grappling with a pathway forward as a country, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of available data. And as survey researchers know well, how exactly a question is worded can drastically change the responses received. In this case, the PRRI organization framed its question in terms of illegal immigration, clearly cuing respondents to remark on immigrants who are, by definition, people performing illegal acts.
The survey question was, knowingly or not, worded in such a way as to probably conjure up images of smugglers, sex traffickers, and such to prime people towards giving an anti-immigrant response. Given the way the question is asked, we are not surprised that it incurred responses making a substantial minority of Americans sound xenophobic.
That includes 19% of Black Protestants, 23% of Jews and 27-30% of Hispanic Catholics and Protestants, showing a surprisingly sizable number of these ethnic minorities also responding affirmatively on the same question.
Since most still believe that immigration needs to happen legally, it’s perhaps understandable that sizable subsets endorse a survey question expressing premonitions about the impact of illegal entry. But it’s also important to note that the best data pushes back on the excessive criminality of those illegally entering the country. One analysis of Texas arrest records found undocumented immigrants arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens. And research out of Stanford dating back to the 1960s finds immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S.
More than that, Walker Wright summarized earlier this year how much benefit to the American economy comes from the millions of immigrants who enter the U.S. each year legally, with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints discouraging its own members over the years from immigrating from one country to another without proper documentation.
Historically, Latter-day Saints have been an outlier in their more positive views on immigration. In a report published in 2015, David E. Campbell, Christopher F. Karpowitz, and J. Quin Monson shared sociological data about Latter-day Saints in American political life that revealed members of the church are “more accepting of immigrants than most other Americans, particularly in contrast to evangelicals.”
This large survey also found that 26% of Latter-day Saints favor more immigration (twice the rate of evangelicals), making them more pro-immigration than any other religious group except Jews (29%).
The authors hypothesized that the high percentage of Latter-day Saints serving missions in other countries “fosters an empathetic perspective on illegal immigrants” since most members have “seen firsthand the abject poverty that compels migrants to enter the U.S. illegally.”
They added that leadership in the church has “consistently been a voice of compassion regarding immigration,” pointing toward their vocal support in prior years for immigration reforms that “balance a law-and-order mentality against compassion for immigrants and a strong desire for policies that keep families together.”
The most glaring problem with the interpretation of the survey is the small sample. Only 97 Latter-day Saints out of a U.S. Latter-day Saint population of nearly 7 million members (17 million worldwide) were respondents in the survey.
At the very least, it would be helpful to point out that Latter-day Saints in this small sample don’t score any different from other Americans, while also scoring better on this measure than other predominantly white Christian denominations (with 34% of Latter-day Saints agreeing with that survey item on the threat of illegal immigrants, compared with 60% of White evangelical Protestants).
The fact that Latter-day Saints are doing better than some and about as good as the rest does not excuse xenophobia in our ranks. Like many we have a ways to go. But context and details really do matter. And in this case, the larger problem unmentioned by various commentators is the fact that the survey in question only had 97 Latter-day Saints, which makes it difficult to tell us much about Latter-day Saints with any kind of precision. The PRRI researchers themselves warn that “The number of cases for Latter-day Saints throughout this report is 97. Results for this group need to be interpreted with caution.”
Like any sensitive matter needing more exploration, it can be helpful to draw on the whole picture of data sources to grasp what’s actually taking place. Doing so with immigration confirms a fairly consistent pattern when it comes to immigration. For example, more recently, Deseret News reporter Sam Benson shared findings from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life demonstrating that while Latter-day Saints polled closely with white evangelical Protestants on many social issues, like gay marriage and abortion, there was a “drastic difference” on immigration.
As confirmed by Kelsey Eyre Hammond, a program coordinator for the study, Latter-day Saints were much less likely than both Protestants and Catholics to say they believe that immigrants coming to the U.S. today burden local communities by using more than their share of social services. And they were also far less likely to agree that “to stop illegal immigration, we need to make it more dangerous for migrants to cross the border, even if it means some of them might die.” (Only 6% of Latter-day Saints said they agreed, the lowest of any faith group surveyed.)
To go deeper, we pulled numbers from the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey this week, where 706 Latter-day Saints were asked to share views on what the “U.S. government should do about immigration.”
When asked whether they support granting “legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least 3 years and not been convicted of any felony crimes” most Latter-day Saints expressed support (61%).
If you narrow in the analysis to only the 330 Latter-day Saints in the sample who identify as Republicans, 52% of Latter-day Saints still support this kind of a legal pathway towards citizenship — the only large religious group to have a majority of their republican adherents do that (42% of Protestants, 49% of Roman Catholics, 45% of Jews, and 39% of atheists expressed support for the same).
Another question in the same 2022 survey tells the same story of relative Latter-day Saint favorability towards immigrants. When asked about the possibility of reducing “legal immigration by 50 percent over the next 10 years by eliminating the visa lottery and ending family-based migration,” about 44% of Latter-day Saints support decreasing legal immigration through these means, whereas Catholics and Protestants are 50% and 52%, respectively. When we subset it to include just republicans, a slight majority (54%) of Latter-day Saint Republicans support reducing legal immigration through these means, whereas for Catholics and Protestants it is 67% and 65%, respectively.
Since many Latter-day Saints are Republican, it should come as no surprise that many members of the Church adopt conservative views on immigration. But a full picture needs to acknowledge that Latter-day Saint republicans are also more immigration-friendly compared with other republicans.
In summary, while the survey about “illegal immigrants poisoning the blood of our country” may be indicative of ugly attitudes held by Americans, including some Latter-day Saints, it is a stretch to see it particularly indicative of anything about Latter-day Saints in particular, especially when the larger data picture demonstrates something else and the sample size in this case was so low that the report itself warns us that the results should be interpreted with caution.