Nearly nine in 10 Orange County residents want changes to U.S. immigration policy, though they differ sharply on what those changes should look like, according to a newly released UC Irvine poll.
Overall, 61% of residents said undocumented immigrants should be offered a chance to apply for legal status, while 28% said they should be deported to the countries they came from.
The divide fell largely along party lines: about eight in 10 Democrats and nearly seven in 10 voters the survey identified as independent — those not affiliating with a major party — supported a path to legal status, while 60% of Republicans said undocumented immigrants should be deported.
Orange County’s electorate is 36.4% Democrat, 34.3% Republican and 23.1% who filed no party preference, according to the latest voter registration data.
The poll, which surveyed 800 adults and was conducted in the last week of June and first week of July, coincided with the ramp-up of immigration raids across the region, including in Orange County, that were encouraged by the Trump administration.
In total, 89% of residents said they want some change to U.S. immigration policy. They “want anything other than what the policy has been up until now,” said Jon Gould, dean of UCI’s School of Social Ecology and director of the UCI-OC polling program.
“For example, mass deportations, which Trump is trying to do, would be seen by those Republicans as something new. So everyone is saying they don’t like what U.S. immigration policy has been,” he said.
While a bulk of Democrats and independent voters said undocumented immigrants should have a path to legal status, only 3% of respondents said they like U.S. immigration policy as it currently stands. Gould noted that the poll asked a two-part question: first whether respondents liked immigration policy as it is or wanted change, and then what specific changes they preferred.
The poll found that age also shapes opinions on immigration.
Three-quarters of residents younger than 35 said they favor providing legal status to undocumented immigrants, compared with 48% of those older than 65. Gould said this generational difference may reflect the county’s evolving demographics, with younger residents more likely to know people from immigrant backgrounds or be children and grandchildren of immigrants themselves.
“We’re at the point right now where we have grandchildren of immigrants living in Orange County,” Gould said. “So there are first-, second-, third-generation immigrants to the United States, into California, living in Orange County. It may very well be that younger people are just traveling in circles with more either undocumented immigrants or they’re traveling in circles where they’re more familiar with people who come from immigrant backgrounds.”
Gould said the poll did not ask respondents whether they are immigrants, and while participants were asked to report their ethnic background, the detailed breakdown was not readily available.
The survey was conducted online using a non-probability sample of adults in Orange County drawn from a panel provided by Dynata Research. Results were weighted to match Census demographics and calibrated to the results of the 2024 presidential election. The modeled standard error is 4.1%.
But Gould said the timing of the poll may have influenced responses and suggested that attitudes may continue to shift, particularly as enforcement efforts receive even more public attention.
“The raids have gotten more coverage, and I think the coverage has been increasingly negative,” he said. “If we were to go test it again this fall, my suspicion is we would see attitudes get more negative to the deportation, even among some Republicans.”