Most Americans believe that the Constitution contains a guarantee of birthright citizenship, though the partisan divide in support for that guarantee is wide.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Since the amendment’s ratification, this clause has generally been interpreted to mean that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a citizen. In a novel legal argument, the Trump Administration asserts that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” encompasses large exceptions to the citizenship guarantee and has asked the Supreme Court to rule on the issue.
Despite the Trump Administration’s interpretation, the view that the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship is widespread. About seven in 10 respondents to the 2025 American Family Survey believe that the Constitution includes this promise, with the remaining respondents split between uncertainty and doubt. Belief in birthright citizenship is strongest among Hispanics, young people, and Democrats. Compared to the nearly nine in 10 Democrats who say the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship, a bare majority of Republicans say the same, with three in 10 resisting the idea.
Some of the Republican resistance to this factual question about whether the Constitution includes a citizenship guarantee may be an expression of opposition to birthright citizenship as a policy. We followed up by asking all respondents, regardless of their beliefs about whether the Constitution includes birthright citizenship, to tell us how much they support or oppose the idea.
A majority of Americans support birthright citizenship, but responses to this question are highly polarized by political party, with close to nine in 10 Democrats supporting it (seven in 10 strongly supporting), compared to just three in 10 Republicans supporting (and only 14% strongly supporting). Given President Trump’s strident opposition to birthright citizenship, we also compared 2024 Trump voters to non-Trump voters (defined as those who voted for someone else or who did not vote at all in 2024). Among self-identified Republicans, for example, only one quarter of those who voted for Trump expressed some level of support for birthright citizenship, compared to half of non-Trump voters. Among white respondents (regardless of self-identified political party), three-quarters of non-Trump voters support birthright citizenship, compared to only onequarter of Trump voters. Only among Hispanics do a majority of Trump voters express support.
What about other features of immigration policy? We also asked respondents to indicate which of four potential immigration policies should be a “high priority” for immigration policy generally (not limited to undocumented immigration).
Again, attitudes about these priorities are highly polarized, and none receives majority support from all partisan groups. Supermajorities of Democrats want to emphasize uniting families and helping asylum seekers, priorities that are rejected by most Republicans. On the other hand, a supermajority of Republicans prefer to limit the overall amount of immigration, something very few Democrats advocate. The least polarized option is admitting workers based on skills, but it is chosen by a bare majority of Democrats and only one-third of Republicans.
One important lesson to emerge from these findings is that for many Republicans, the overriding policy priority is limiting the number of immigrants in the country. In fact, nearly half of Republicans (49%) chose limiting overall immigration as their only priority for immigration policy. For them, there seems to be no good form of immigration at all. By contrast, less than one in 10 Democrats (8%) selected limiting the flow of immigrants as their only priority.
Americans’ personal experiences and relationships also structure their attitudes about immigration priorities. We asked respondents to indicate whether they personally know someone “who has experienced visa delays, deportation, or family separation due to U.S. immigration policy.” About 23% of respondents said they do know a family member, friend, acquaintance, or coworker who has such an experience. (Respondents could also indicate that they prefer not to say, and 4% chose that option. These respondents are excluded for purposes of the following analysis.)
Such personal connections matter. Those who know someone experiencing an immigration challenge are more likely to support uniting families, helping asylum seekers, and admitting workers based on skills, and they are less likely to support limiting immigration. The effects of personal connections persist when we analyze Republicans and Democrats separately. Of course, these are only correlational analyses, not causal claims; those who have more liberal immigration attitudes may also be more likely to seek out personal connections to immigrants.
While these questions allowed respondents to indicate their support or opposition for multiple policy priorities, we also asked two questions designed to help respondents consider potential tradeoffs between different priorities or values, including the value of keeping families together.
Again we find substantial partisan disagreement in how Americans make these tradeoffs. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to prioritize reuniting families over immigration policies designed to assist skilled workers. Even so, about half of both Democrats and Republicans refuse to make the tradeoff, choosing the neutral category. And when it comes to separating undocumented parents from citizen children, about eight in 10 Democrats oppose, while a majority of Republicans support family separation. Across both questions, keeping immigrant families together is a lower priority for Republicans than for Democrats.
We have asked these questions about immigration policy across several years, including in 2015 and 2016 (the end of the Obama administration and during Donald Trump’s initial run for the presidency) and again in 2024 (the end of the Biden administration) and 2025 (the beginning of the second Trump administration). The question of prioritizing reunification of families over admitting skilled workers has always been one where large percentages seem to be torn — in every year, close to half of Americans select the neutral option. Nonetheless, opinions have polarized, especially in light of the second Trump administration’s policies. In 2015, the gap between Republicans’ and Democrats’ preferences for reuniting families over admitting skilled workers was 19 percentage points. In 2025, that gap increased to 29 percentage points.
Increased polarization is even more profound on the issue of separating immigrant parents from citizen children. During the Obama administration, the partisan gap in opposition to this policy was an already-large 43 percentage points, but by 2025, that gap had increased to 66 percentage points. A large portion of the change is among Democrats, indicating their nearly complete rejection of the immigration policies of the second Trump administration.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the current political environment and the rhetoric of the Trump administration, partisans are deeply polarized by many aspects of immigration policy. Though a majority of Americans recognize the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, support or opposition to that idea is structured by partisanship. And Republicans and Democrats fundamentally disagree about the policies our immigration system should prioritize, even when such policies may separate families. It is hard to imagine a government policy that would be more disruptive to family life than separating parents from children, so the fact that Republican antipathy to immigration overrides even the goal of keeping families together is especially striking.
METHODOLOGY NOTE
Between August 6-18, 2025, YouGov interviewed 3317 nationally representative respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 3000 to produce the final dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The frame was constructed by stratified sampling from the full 2023 American Community Survey (ACS) one-year sample with selection within strata by weighted sampling with replacements (using the person weights on the public use file).
The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, region, and home ownership. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles.
The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 and 2024 presidential vote choice as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (four categories), race (four categories), and education (four categories) to produce the final weight. The overall margin of error is +/- 2.1%.