Why We Can’t Trust Polls on Immigration, in One Horribly Xenophobic Chart
16th August 2013
While polls consistently show that Americans overwhelmingly favor the tech industry’s #1 legislative goal, comprehensive immigration reform, I wondered if I could also get them to agree to a horribly xenophobic plan that was the opposite of the proposed bill: deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. We conducted a CrunchGov poll with Google Surveys to find out and the results, you’ll find, are surprising.
Not to those of us who understand that what people say on polls is typically what they feel they ‘ought’ to say, rather than how they really feel.
The truth is that most people wish illegal immigrants to be removed.
In our poll, a majority of all Americans (53%) and a whopping 74% of Republicans want to kick out every undocumented immigrant.
An entirely reasonable position, except to those who feel that laws they disagree with are somehow to be freely ignored.
Bear in mind, no one, not even the most anti-immigrant members of Congress, are proposing any remotely close to this idea.
Perhaps that’s why the popularity of Congress is at an all-time low. Just maybe.
At most, Congressmen disagree over whether current undocumented immigrants should be permitted to become citizens, not whether they can stay in the country.
And that’s what’s wrong with Congress — their debates are always about to which extent they will do the wrong thing, not whether anybody is interested in doing the right thing.