Last week, prior to declaring an end to the government shutdown over his demand for border wall funding without receiving any such funding, Donald Trump unveiled a new slogan to promote the wall, a slogan that he implored his Twitter followers to use “and pray.” The slogan was, “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!”
But five days later, the first poll to measure public response to Trump’s new slogan shows that “BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!” falls flat with Americans. According to the poll by , the assumption contained within Trump’s statement — that erecting a border wall will lead to a drop in U.S. crime rates — is not supported by evidence.
According to Yahoo! News , a CATO Institute study last year showed that immigrants who have entered the country illegally commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than do native-born U.S. citizens, while a separate study published in the journal Criminology showed that states with greater numbers of undocumented immigrants experience lower crime rates than states with fewer “illegal” immigrants.
The same YouGov poll also rated Trump’s overall approval among U.S. voters at 39 percent, in line with the overall average of all polls compiled by the data site FiveThirtyEight.com , which gives Trump’s average approval rating as of Monday at 39.4 percent.
The poll also asked Americans to rate another Trump Twitter message about his hoped-for border wall, in which he branded people who oppose the border wall as “fools.”
“Only fools, or people with a political agenda, don’t want a Wall or Steel Barrier to protect our Country from Crime, Drugs and Human Trafficking. It will happen – it always does!” Trump wrote on Saturday.
According to the YouGov poll, 53 percent of Americans rated that Trump tweet as “bad” or “terrible.”
