Multiple Studies: Europeans Support 'Travel Ban' More Than Americans

Nick Kangadis | February 8, 2017
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Polls are so subjective. Case in point: the results of this particular survey even shocked the poll-maker.

The Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership in International Affairs, more commonly known as Chatham House, conducted a survey among 10,000 people across 10 European countries. Chatham House gave each person the same statement, and then asked whether the person agreed, disagreed, or neither.

Here's the statement: “All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped.”

The results:

Overall, across all 10 of the European countries an average of 55% agreed that all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped, 25% neither agreed nor disagreed and 20% disagreed.

Majorities in all but two of the ten states agreed, ranging from 71% in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy to 47% in the United Kingdom and 41% in Spain. In no country did the percentage that disagreed surpass 32%.

That means that only one in five Europeans surveyed think that “migration from mainly Muslim countries” should continue. In fact, not one single country in this study had even a third of its surveyed population disagree with the study’s focus statement.

Here is a graph of the study:

How does the United States stack up compared to the results of the Chatham House survey? We’re Americans, so it really depends who is conducting the poll.

A Quinnipiac poll released on Tuesday said that 51 percent of Americans disagree with President Trump’s travel suspension.

Conversely, a poll conducted jointly by Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) and TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence (TIPP) concluded that 51 percent of Americans support the move.

One reason that Europeans might understand the migrant/refugee crisis better than those of us in the U.S. can be surmised by comparative numbers alone. Compare the amount of migrants/refugees that Germany takes in to that of the U.S.:

According to former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton's Gatestone Institute:

An estimated 300,000 migrants arrived in Germany in 2016, in addition to the more than one million who arrived in 2015. At least 80% (or 800,000 in 2015 and 240,000 in 2016) of the newcomers were Muslim, according to the Central Council of Muslims in Germany.

The 2016 numbers alone represented a four percent population increase in Germany.

Here are the numbers for the U.S., according to Pew Research:

A total of 38,901 Muslim refugees entered the U.S. in fiscal year 2016, making up almost half (46%) of the nearly 85,000 refugees who entered the country in that period, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center.

If you include every refugee, Muslim or not, the percentage of refugees that came into the U.S. last year comes out to .002 percent of the population.

Granted, the U.S. has a population almost four times the size of Germany, but the numbers above could be an explainer as to why some Europeans understand the issue better than the average person in the U.S. 

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