When Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), amplified baseless, false claims about Haitian immigrants earlier this month, threats to those immigrants and the Ohio community in which they lived spiked. Some of the threats reportedly originated in foreign countries, but many didn’t. Local leaders in the city of Springfield and in the state — including the Republican governor — rose to the immigrants’ defense.
But many Republican voters, Donald Trump’s base, believed the false claims — just as they believe a panoply of other false claims about immigrants that are at the center of Trump’s political rhetoric.
Research by KFF released on Tuesday shows the extent to which Republicans are more likely to have heard false claims about immigrants and to accept them as true.
KFF presented Americans with four statements about immigration, two objectively true and two objectively false. The false statements included Trump’s frequent claim that immigrants are driving a surge in violent crime and that they are taking jobs, spurring an increase in unemployment among native-born Americans.
Overall, about three-quarters of Americans said they had heard such claims from an elected official or politician — presumably often Trump. But while Democrats mostly (correctly) indicated that these claims were false, a large majority of Republicans said that they were probably true. They were also slightly more likely to say they had heard such claims.
Republicans were less likely to indicate that they had heard the true claims about immigrants, including that immigrants help fill labor shortages (as in places maligned by Trump) and that immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes annually. While most Republicans said the former claim was true — it is true — most incorrectly said the latter was false. Most Democrats said both claims were true.
KFF asked other, related questions, finding similar gaps between party affiliation. Republicans were more likely to incorrectly believe undocumented immigrants were eligible for federal health-care benefits like Medicaid, for example. This is a claim made frequently by Trump to suggest immigrants are a drain on the economy and the federal budget. In reality — in part because immigrants can’t avail themselves of many federal programs, immigrants pay more in taxes than they draw down in services.
A majority of Democrats understand that. Eight in 10 Republicans think the opposite is true.
The KFF research comports with recent YouGov polling conducted for the Economist that asked Americans whether they believed various false claims Trump had made, including about immigration.
More than three-quarters of Republicans, for example, said they believed there was an intentional effort by Democrats to bring immigrants into the country so they could vote — a belief that is downstream from the “great replacement” theory and that reflects the GOP effort to focus on a nonexistent flood of noncitizen voters.
About half of Republicans said it was at least probably true that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating pets as Trump and Vance claimed, to Springfield, Ohio’s detriment. Only a third correctly indicated that this was false.
Of course, another recent YouGov poll found that Republicans were less likely than Americans overall to believe that Trump’s elevation of those baseless internet rumors was responsible for the spike in threats in the town.
KFF’s research included surveying immigrants to the United States. A third of them told the organization Trump’s rhetoric had had a negative effect on the way they were treated in the country. Among Asian immigrants, 45 percent indicated that his rhetoric had had such an effect. Most also said they thought immigrants would be better off if Vice President Kamala Harris won this November’s election than if Trump did.
Given Trump’s willingness to make false, disparaging claims about immigrants and the permeation of those claims with his base, that’s not terribly surprising.
