Evangelicals are strong backers of Trump immigration policies

Vox:

Why are white evangelicals so devoted to President Trump?

It’s a question that has preoccupied many academics and political observers — and a Christmas Day exchange between Pete Buttigieg and a Christian right blogger shed some light on one answer.

Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, tweeted that Jesus Christ “came into this world ... not as a citizen, but as a refugee.” In response to that Christmas message, religious right blogger Matt Walsh tweeted that “Joseph and Mary went to their ancestral home in Bethlehem for a census. In no sense did Jesus ‘come into this world as a refugee.’”

That pushback caught the attention of Eastern Illinois University political scientist Ryan P. Burge. The question of Jesus’s immigration status is still a subject of debate among Christians. But Walsh’s forceful response did underscore something for Burge that he wanted to dive deeper into: the fact that “white evangelicals (like Matt Walsh) are incredibly conservative on immigration.”

In a post probing the issue on the site Religion in Public, Burge used data from a 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which asked about 60,000 participants a host of questions on a range of issues.

On immigration, respondents were asked five different questions: whether they supported withholding federal funds from sanctuary states and cities; increasing border funding by $25 billion; detaining those who cross the border without authorization multiple times; ending a visa lottery program and family-based immigration, both of which have been the subject of President Donald Trump’s ire; and rolling back the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has offered deportation protection and work permits to over 700,000 young unauthorized immigrants since 2012.

Burge’s analysis, published Thursday, finds that on issues ranging from border security to immigration detention, white evangelicals — a group that includes dozens of individual denominations, from the Southern Baptist Convention to the Pentecostal movement — are substantially more conservative than the average American and even the next most conservative religious group.

He calculated the share of white evangelicals who supported the policies, the share of the next most conservative religious group who supported the policies, and the share of all respondents who supported the policies.

Evangelicals were consistently the most conservative by a wide margin.
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One of the primary beneficiaries of strong immigration policy has been blacks some of which are also evangelical.  A recent ICE raid on a chicken processing plant in Mississippi resulted in many illegals being removed from their jobs and they were replaced primarily with blacks.  In fact, illegals have been undercutting black employment for years.  It is surprising that so many blacks still support Democrats and their open borders policies.