Dr. E. Kyle Romero is a 2025-2026 PRRI Public Fellow focusing on immigration and migration. He is also an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida.
As the Supreme Court weighs President Donald Trump’s effort to narrow birthright citizenship, the administration has framed the issue as a defense of the value of American citizenship rather than simply a change in immigration policy. In April, the administration argued in court that automatic citizenship “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship,” while Trump called the current system “STUPID.” However, the deeper issue is not birthright citizenship alone. It is rather a broader struggle over what makes someone truly American — and whether the nation is defined by constitutional principle or by narrower ideas of belonging. This Spotlight Analysis examines American views on national identity and immigration, focusing on how competing definitions of what it means to be truly American, along with Christian nationalism, relate to immigration attitudes.
PRRI’s 2025 American Values Survey data suggest that the country is not simply divided between those who support immigration and those who oppose it. The deeper divide is over what makes someone truly American, and whether the nation is best understood as a civic community built around rights and pluralism or as a more bounded community shaped by birth, religion, and cultural inheritance. Americans overwhelmingly endorse civic values as central to national identity: 93% say believing in individual freedoms such as freedom of speech is important to being truly American, 91% say believing in the Constitution, and 89% say accepting people of diverse racial and religious backgrounds. At the same time, substantial numbers also define Americanness in more exclusionary terms: 75% say speaking English is important, 57% say believing in God, 54% say being born in America, and 43% say being a Christian, suggesting that civic and ethnocultural understandings of the nation coexist uneasily in the public mind.
Immigration is where these competing understandings of the nation come into sharpest focus. On one hand, Americans continue to back inclusion in important ways. Support for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants living in the country illegally remains robust: 82% of Democrats, 61% of independents, and even 40% of Republicans say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to become citizens provided they meet certain requirements.
On the other hand, more than one-third of Americans (37%) agree that the federal government should detain immigrants who are in the country illegally in internment camps until they can be deported. Nearly as many Americans (32%) favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court. For a large share of the public, immigration is not only a question of policy but of exclusion, discipline, and the enforcement of national boundaries.
One of the clearest ways to understand this divide is through the growth of Christian nationalism. PRRI’s Christian nationalism scale captures support for and opposition to a vision of the nation in which Christianity is central to American identity. One-third of Americans (33%) agree that being Christian is an important part of being truly American, 30% agree that the U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation, and 42% agree that U.S. laws should be based on Christian values. Based on questions like these, PRRI’s 2025 American Values Atlas further finds that 11% of Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents and another 21% as Sympathizers.
Support for Christian nationalism is strongly associated with harsher and more exclusionary views on belonging. Among Christian nationalism Adherents, 67% support the “great replacement theory” claim that immigrants are invading the country and replacing Americans’ cultural and ethnic background; among Sympathizers, 51% agree. By contrast, only 32% of Skeptics and 8% of Rejecters express support for that claim. This reflects a deeper struggle over whether immigrants are viewed as future members of the nation or as agents of cultural displacement.
The same pattern appears on birthright citizenship, reflecting competing understandings of what makes someone an American. Nearly half of Christian nationalism Adherents (46%) oppose the Constitution’s existing guarantee that all children born in the United States are automatically granted citizenship regardless of their parents’ citizenship status, compared with 29% of all Americans and just 11% of Rejecters. Christian nationalism Adherents are also less likely to favor birthright citizenship outright.
Support for punitive immigration policy follows the same pattern. Among Christian nationalism Adherents, 57% support deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons without court challenges, and 69% support detaining undocumented immigrants in internment camps. Among Rejecters, by contrast, support falls to 10% and 13%, respectively. These stark differences suggest that exclusionary immigration attitudes are not random or isolated, but part of a broader worldview in which the nation is imagined as Christian, threatened, and in need of protection from outsiders.
PRRI’s data demonstrate that the country is not merely debating enforcement policy but rather debating the terms of national membership itself. Large majorities still say that being truly American means embracing freedom, constitutionalism, and racial and religious diversity. But significant numbers also continue to define Americanness through birth, Christianity, language, and cultural continuity. Immigration becomes the site where those competing visions collide most directly.
The data help clarify why the politics of belonging can feel so incoherent, with most Americans supporting a pathway to citizenship, but many others supporting punitive policies and casting immigrants as threats to the nation’s identity. These cross-pressures suggest that the central question in immigration politics today is not whether Americans support newcomers but whether Americans imagine the nation as open enough to absorb them. The future of immigration politics may depend less on shifting views of policy details than on which of those visions of America proves more persuasive.
