WASHINGTON _ Nearly nine in 10 Americans support a program that allows undocumented immigrants who qualify for the DREAM Act to remain in the United States, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found.
Eighty-six percent of respondents said they supported some kind of program for "undocumented immigrants to stay in the United States if they arrived here as a child, completed high school or military service and have not been convicted of a serious crime."
Consensus on how to handle so-called "Dreamers" spanned the ideological spectrum. Ninety-six percent of self-identified liberals, 87 percent of moderates, and 77 percent of conservatives supported a program for them to remain in the U.S.
The results came just a few weeks after President Donald Trump announced he would be ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, initiated under President Barack Obama in 2012. Trump has set a six-month deadline for Congress to come up with a solution for those who qualified for DACA and has expressed a willingness to negotiate with Congressional Democrats on a deal that includes increased border security.
"We're working on a plan _ subject to getting massive border controls," the president said earlier in September.
"You have 800,000 young people, brought here, no fault of their own. So we're working on a plan. We'll see how it works out. We're going to get massive border security as part of that. And I think something can happen, we'll see what happens, but something will happen."
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Ohio is leading a task force of fellow Republicans to find that compromise deal while Freedom Caucus Chairman Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., seeks a more conservative solution.
Sixty-five percent of respondents to the Post-ABC poll said they would support a measure that paired increased funding for border security with a proposal to let dreamers stay in the U.S.
And most, 55 percent, said they opposed reducing the number of illegal immigrants allowed into the U.S. by half. Respondents were split on that issue based on party and ideology, with Republicans and conservatives favoring a reduction by half and Democrats and liberals opposing it.
Abt Associates of Cambridge, Massachusetts, conducted the poll by telephone from Sept. 18 through Sept. 21, among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. The results have a sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
