This weekend, Americans nationwide protested against the separation of immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Despite outrage over the current border crisis, more voters now think a merit-based immigration system should win out over the current family-based one.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters now favor moving to a merit-based system for legal immigration that brings in legal immigrants based on their skills. Support for merit-based immigration has been on the rise since President Trump first proposed it in April of last year. Thirty-four percent (34%) of voters prefer to keep the existing family-based system, showing little change from previous surveys, but 16% are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

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The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on June 25-26, 2018 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.