Donald Trump is trying to end birthright citizenship as he begins his second term as U.S. president, but is the American public on board? CNN’s Harry Enten looks into the polling data through the years and across political lines.

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Donald Trump is pursuing the termination of birthright citizenship as he embarks on his second term as president of the United States. However, polling data suggests that this policy is relatively unpopular within the American public. An average of all polls indicates that only 35% of Americans support ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants illegally residing in the country. A clear majority of 53% oppose such a measure. 

This lack of support extends across historical and political lines. Polls from as far back as 2011 show that support for ending birthright citizenship has remained consistent, generally hovering around one-third of the population. Within the Republican Party, which forms Trump's primary political base, support for the policy is at 56%, which is significantly lower than his overall approval rating among Republican voters, suggesting a notable division within the party. 

Among Democrats and Independents, support for ending birthright citizenship is even lower, at 21% and 19%, respectively. This policy unites members of both groups in their opposition to Trump's proposal and indicates that pursuing such changes might challenge Trump's efforts to maintain and grow his popularity. 



Trump acts to end birthright citizenship, but do Americans agree?

You've been looking at the data and polling on how Americans and political parties stand on the birthright citizenship issue. What have you discovered? Yeah, I mean, look, there are a lot of policies that Donald Trump is going to push during his second term that are popular. This ain't one of them. This ain't one of them. It's quite an unpopular policy. And we can see this in the polling right here. All right. End birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants illegally here. Look at this. Only about a third of the country supports it. Only 35 percent of an average of all polling clear. A clear majority, 53 percent oppose it. You rarely can get such a large majority in this country that is so polarized along political lines to agree on an issue. But on this one, the overwhelming majority oppose it. And I will note that I looked at every single poll on the subject and in every single poll, a majority opposed it. That's why the average reflects this. This isn't just one poll. It's across a ton of polls. But it's not just in the here and now. We can look at this issue historically because Donald Trump is not the first guy to push this. It was pushed by Republicans back in the early 2010. So we can see this here. All right. Support ending birthright citizenship. You go back to 2011. Look at that. It was 35 percent. You jump forward to 2015, right when Donald Trump was getting his first presidential bid going. You could see it was 31 percent. You look now at the average of polls. It's 35 percent. The bottom line is support for this issue has not changed. It has been consistent. Only about one third of the country support the idea of ending birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants here illegally. But it's not just in the here and now. It's not just across time. It is also when you look within political parties, because you might expect that Donald Trump's political base, Republicans, would be overwhelmingly in support of this measure to support ending birthright citizenship. But what do we see here? We only see 56 percent of Republicans agree. Now that is a majority. That is a majority. But keep in mind that Donald Trump's approval rating among Republican voters is closer to say 90, 95 percent in even some polls. And so when you see only 56 percent of Republicans supporting it, you get the idea that there is a large chunk of the Republican base, 35, 40 percent, who do not support this despite supporting Donald Trump. And then perhaps not surprisingly, you can also see here only 21 percent of Democrats, only 19 percent of independents support this. This issue is one that divides the Republican base, unites Democrats and independents against Donald Trump. If he continues pushing issues like this, he will deal with a very short honeymoon period, which of course he might be used to given he had a very short honeymoon period in 2017. He'd be far better off going after other issues than this particular one if he wants to continue the popularity that he's been able to drum up over the last few months.

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