A new poll shows a plurality of American voters believe employers use migrants’ immigration status to suppress wages, and that a key piece of Rep. Maria Salazar’s Dignity Act is unpopular with Floridians.
The national survey of 1,030 registered voters, conducted Sept. 30 through Oct. 5 by Wave Polling and Research, found 43 percent agreed that “employers use immigration status to hold wages down for everyone.” Twenty-nine percent disagreed, and 7 percent said they were unsure.
A companion poll of 1,030 people in Florida asked specifically about a central element of Salazar’s bill, described to respondents as: “Dignity Act-style: create a new legal class for immigrant workers, but don’t give them citizenship.” Fifty percent of Florida respondents opposed the idea, while 29 percent supported it.
Both surveys were funded by UNITE HERE!, a union that organizes hospitality and restaurant workers and has pushed for a congressional amnesty that would let it unionize illegal migrants already working in those industries.
Salazar’s Pitch
Salazar, a Miami Republican, has defended her Dignity Act by arguing it benefits more than just large corporations. At a Capitol Hill press conference in April, she said:
When people tell me that I am trying to help big business to have cheap labor, I’m going to answer them: It’s not [just] big business, it’s not only agricultural or construction or hospitality or health care or manufacturing — it’s more.
FloridaPolitics.com reported Oct. 28 that the worker-visa feature of the bill “isn’t particularly popular among voters in her home state or nationally,” citing the new polling.
Broader Public Sentiment
The findings track with other recent polling on immigration and the economy. A Gallup survey from June found Americans were more likely to see negative effects than positive ones from migration on job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, by a margin of 33 percent to 27 percent, and on housing availability and costs, by 40 percent to 23 percent.
In May 2022, Goldman Sachs argued that migration holds down wages, urging the Biden administration to import more lower-wage foreign workers as a way to combat inflation. A separate poll in June 2026 showed strong public support for reducing the inflow of legalized migrants.
G. Elliott Morris, who heads Wave Polling, said in April that economic pressure is pushing non-ideological, infrequent voters toward the Democratic Party.
Questions About the Poll’s Framing
The summary released of the Wave Polling survey offers little detail on the partisan breakdown of respondents and provides no evidence that participants were given information about the scale of current legal migration. Congress currently authorizes legalized migration at a rate of roughly one migrant for every 3.5 American births.
Some questions in the survey also presented respondents with forced choices between overlapping explanations. One asked whether “the bigger reason wages for people like you haven’t kept up with the cost of living” was “large corporations holding wages down” or “immigrants competing for jobs” — a framing that does not allow for both factors to be true at once.
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