A new poll shows strong support and weak opposition for Donald Trump’s merit immigration reform, despite skewed questions from the pollsters.

The poll showed that roughly 50 percent of likely voters want the inflow of legal immigrants to be reduced, even though the poll failed to describe the numbers and scale of immigration.

Only about about 16 percent, or one-in-six voters, strongly oppose Trump’s merit reform, despite fervent hostility from the media and from Democratic Party’s progressive base, according to the Morning Consult poll of 1,992 registered voters.

The Morning Consult poll was taken from August 3 to August 6, and it shows that 44 percent of respondents believe Congress should pass the merit reform, while 31 percent said Congress should not pass the bill. Large numbers of people –24 percent — declined to state their opinions, suggesting a hidden reservoir of support for Trump’s pro-American measure.

The poll, which was conducted with Politico, downplayed the economic impact of immigration but played up ideas about “family unification” and the virtues of immigrants. For example, the poll showed 66 percent agreement with the pollsters’ claim that “legal immigrants in the United States today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Yet the new poll also showed that 49 percent of Americans “strongly” or “somewhat” want to reduce the annual legal inflow.

In contrast, polls which provide data to respondents, or which ask questions about the economic fairness of immigration, do show near-universal support for the 50 percent reductions in legal immigration set by the merit bill which was drafted by GOP legislators, Sen. David Perdue and Sen. Tom Cotton.

For example, immigration reform group NumbersUSA recently conducted 10 state polls about immigration policy. In Michigan, the group’s poll shows that 61 percent of people “strongly” support “setting up rules to ensure that businesses give first preference for jobs to American workers and legal immigrants already in this country before businesses can ask for new immigrant workers.” Only 10 percent of respondents “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed that proposed rule.

The Michigan poll also showed that 74 percent of people say “business should be required to try harder to recruit and train from groups with the highest unemployment,” while only 11 percent said, “government should continue to bring in new immigrants to compete for jobs.”

The NumbersUSA group released polling data from Florida, Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Those states were won by Trump in 2016 and will get to vote for or against incumbent Democratic Senators next November.

Polls by pro-immigration business and progressive groups usually push respondents to declare support for the hopes of migrants or to endorse the country’s supposed tradition of favoring migrants. When executed skillfully, those “nation of immigrants” push-polls can show up to 80 percent support for an amnesty. That manipulation is easy to do because Americans do like immigrants, they want to be seen liking immigrants, and they fear being stigmatized by progressives and the media.

Some pollsters go to great efforts to find out what people want, rather than what they say. For example, a pair of academic polls from 2005 and 2010 showed that more than half of white Americans prefer all immigration be stopped.

Under pre-Trump policies, the federal government annually imports 1 million legal immigrants into the United States, just as 4 million young Americans turn 18.

The federal government also annually awards roughly 1.5 million temporary work permits to foreigners, grants temporary work visas to roughly 500,000 new contract workers, such as H-1B workers, and also largely ignores the resident population of eight million employed illegal immigrants.

The current annual flood of foreign labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families.