The results of an ongoing survey at UTRGV says more people in the Rio Grande Valley are in favor of building a border wall compared to a few years ago.

The survey asked those participating if they were in favor of building a wall along the border to Mexico.

The 2022 survey had 640 respondents, and 65% of them said they opposed border wall construction.

A 2018 survey asking the same question found that 84% of them opposed border wall construction.

"We found them interesting, and we want to know why,” said Dr. Mi-Son Kim, a professor of political science at UTRGV who helped design the survey. 

“Now, more people are in favor and more people behave more like the national level population."

Kim said several factors may help explain the shift — including the attention the border received in those years, national elections that centered on border policy, and recent election trends favoring Republican candidates

The results of this survey call for more research, Kim said.

“We still need to study and prove why and what's actually going on,” Kim said.

The survey was done via the polling center at the UTRGV Political Science Department. Student employees at the Center for Survey Research and Policy Analysis called people from a list of randomly generated phone numbers.

"We don't have any individual, identifiable information,” Kim explained. “We just use these randomly generated phone numbers, and we try to reach out to them."

Student employees are currently working on a survey regarding SpaceX. The department hopes to get more research projects through the surveys.

“When people receive our call, please try to answer, and share your valid opinions,” Kim said.