Dr. Lina-Maria Murillo is a 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellow and an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She’s the author of Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. She is expressing her views as an individual and not on behalf of her employer.
President Donald Trump has stated he will not consider any other piece of legislation until the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act) is passed, claiming that undocumented migrants in Democratic strongholds across the country are voting illegally and are to blame for his 2020 presidential election loss. However, there is no evidence supporting these claims and, despite multiple lawsuits filed by Trump and his followers, none could provide any concerted proof of mass illegal voting by non-citizens. This Spotlight Analysis examines how emphasizing fears about immigration and demographic change has become central to recent efforts to restrict voting access through measures such as the SAVE Act and the legal challenge to birthright citizenship. Examining recent survey data, however, shows that the fears driving these policy efforts are not shared by most Americans.
In the last decade, far- and-extreme-right-wing circles have fed manufactured anxieties about undocumented migrants voting into the mainstream Republican party by way of Trump. The “great replacement theory,” the claim that immigrants from the global south are invading the country and replacing Americans’ cultural and ethnic background to steal Americans’ votes, jobs, and land is key to this way of thinking. As conservative commentators point to declining white birth rates and an influx of nonwhite migrants as the causes for the need to preserve culture (what Vice President JD Vance calls ‘heritage Americans’), it is clear that discourses about protecting or preserving the cultural and demographic makeup of the United States have become central to certain political appeals.
As a historian of reproduction and population control, my research reveals that fears about nonwhite people taking over American politics, land, and culture are not new. Yet this current iteration has been used to bridge anti-immigrant sentiment to ending birthright citizenship.
A constitutional right enshrined in the 14th Amendment, birthright citizenship is a bedrock principle that helped expand the democratic experiment for millions of people in the aftermath of the Civil War. And yet, the U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a challenge to Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship. On the day before the court heard the case, Trump posted on his Truth Social account, “Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America.” Others in Trump’s orbit have flooded the airwaves with fears of high fertility rates among supposedly nonwhite, noncitizen women. As one Fox News host claimed, without evidence, on its Easter broadcast, “320,000 babies were born to ‘unauthorized or legal temporary migrant mothers’ in the U.S. in 2023.”
Despite so much political capital expended on these ideas, survey research shows Americans aren’t worried about demographic change or white fertility decline in the ways Trump and his supporters would have us think. As the 2025 PRRI American Values Survey reveals, most Americans actually reject the idea that immigration and demographics changes erase American culture. Only 32% of Americans agreed that “immigrants are invading the country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.” Support for this view differs substantially by party, with Republicans (62%) far more likely to agree than independents (26%) and Democrats (10%). In fact, agreement with the “great replacement theory” has declined slightly, except among Republicans (who are mostly white), since PRRI first began asking this question in 2019.
Far-right adherents pushing for pronatalist policies to offset white demographic decline would be surprised to learn that most Americans aren’t interested. The same survey shows an overwhelming 86% of Americans are against “policies that encourage only certain Americans to have children to help preserve the country’s current demographic makeup.”
When asked questions that bring immigration and birthright citizenship to the forefront, most Americans remain united in the protection of birthright citizenship. Two-thirds of Americans (67%) favor the Constitution’s “existing guarantee that all children who are born in the United States are automatically granted U.S. citizenship, regardless of their parents’ citizenship status,” while only 29% oppose.
Viewed from the nexus of religion and race, the numbers remain solidly in favor. Strong majorities of most religious groups support birthright citizenship, including 83% of Black Protestants, 82% of Hispanic Catholics, 78% of Jewish Americans, 76% of unaffiliated Americans, 71% of other non-Christians, 70% of Hispanic Protestants, and 59% of white mainline/non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics. The only outliers are white evangelical Protestants who also support birthright citizenship (53%) by the slimmest majority.
These numbers tell us that most Americans remain hard-pressed to expound on the kind of racial and ethnic fear-mongering the current administration has used in its attempts to subvert the U.S. election system and dismantle constitutional rights. Even though Trump and his supporters have flooded our politics and media with far-right white supremacist talking points masquerading as policy, Americans just aren’t buying it.
