Live By Statue Of Liberty's Words, NYers Say Amid Migrant Crisis: Poll

NEW YORK CITY — "Give me your tired, your poor…" aren't just words on the Statue of Liberty, they're a guide to handling the migrant crisis, New Yorkers overwhelmingly agreed in a new poll.

Nearly 70 percent of New Yorkers surveyed agree that America should live by the poem on the Statue of Liberty as asylum seekers continue to flow into the city, according to a Siena College poll released Tuesday.

The poll found large majorities of New Yorkers — despite the much-bemoaned challenges from the arrival of 110,000 huddled masses in the city over the past year — support stances and policies that support immigrants and migrants.

"Despite concerns that some New Yorkers have about the recent influx of migrants, 84% of all New Yorkers agree that most of the current migrants want only to build a better life for themselves and their family and 69% agree that America should continue to live by the words written on the Statue of Liberty, 'Give me your tired, your poor…send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,'" said Don Levy, the director of Siena College Research Institute, in a statement.

New Yorkers did split along partisan lines, however, with majorities of Republicans largely seeing immigrants and migrants as dangerous, looking for handouts or as a source of illegal drugs, the poll found.

A small majority of Republicans said that the U.S. no longer needs new immigrants, but majorities of Democrats and New Yorkers say the opposite, according to the poll.

And New Yorkers by a 50 percent to 41 percent margin opposed the construction of a border wall along the entire U.S. border with Mexico, the poll found.

Among all New Yorkers surveyed, majorities supported making it easier for current migrants to be granted work authorizations (59 percent to 33 percent), using federally owned land and buildings as temporary shelters for asylum seekers (56 percent to 36 percent) and a comprehensive immigration reform bill that provides a pathway to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. (60 percent to 28 percent), according to the poll.

Eleven percent of the New Yorkers polled said they were born in another country, the poll stated.

Read the full poll here.