Almost four out of five Republican primary voters in Coweta County, Georgia, said they support reducing overall legal immigration to the United States in response to a ballot question on Tuesday evening.
On Tuesday, Republican primary voters headed to the polls to cast their votes in the state’s highly-contested gubernatorial race.
In Coweta County, primary voters were asked about their opinions on the current rate of legal immigration, where more than a million legal immigrants are awarded green cards annually, seven in ten of whom arrive via the process known as “chain migration” where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the United States.
Former President Trump swept the county with nearly 70 percent of the vote in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
The question on the county ballot read, “According to federal government statistics, the U.S. adds over 1,000,000 new legal immigrants a year on average. Should that number be reduced to 500,000 or less?”
With more than 25,000 votes cast in the county, more than 78 percent of GOP primary voters said they want legal immigration cut at least in half. Just 22 percent said they did not want to see legal immigration reduced.
For decades now, over a million legal immigrants are awarded green cards annually, and another million are given temporary work visas to take American jobs. At these historically high levels, the United States is on pace to drive up the nation’s foreign-born population to a level not seen since 1890.
Today’s foreign-born population, driven almost exclusively by legal immigration, stands at 46.2 million — the largest number of immigrants residing in the U.S. in recorded history. At current legal immigration levels, the foreign-born population is expected to hit over 69 million by 2060.
As Breitbart News has reported, past waves of record levels of immigration have been followed by near-moratoriums on immigration.
The nation’s last immigration boom — between 1900 and 1920 — was eventually met with an immigration halt.
A view of Ellis Island in New York Bay, run by the US Immigration Service. Between 1892 and 1954 over 20 million immigrants to the United States of America passed through it on their way to a new life. (Hulton Archive/Getty)
Between 1925 and 1966, annual legal immigration levels did not exceed 327,000 admissions, a four-decades-long near-moratorium that allowed for assimilation of the massive inflows of immigrants from prior years.
Since major changes were enacted in 1965 and expanded on in the 1990s by former President George H.W. Bush, legal immigration levels have continued booming for over five decades.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.