Huge bipartisan support for legality to illegals.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A new survey released by the Pew Research Center indicates that the vast majority of Americans look favorably upon finding a way for undocumented immigrants currently within the country to have a legal way of staying, but are far less supportive of giving them a path to citizenship.
According to the poll, 73% of Americans would like to allow illegal aliens already in the US to stay via some legal means, but only 46% would want them to have a way of applying for citizenship, while only 24% would want them to be allowed to apply for permanent residency.
A separate 24% said that undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay in the US, and should be made to leave. Politically, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans want to find a path to legality for illegal immigrants, with 81% and 64% voicing approval for such a measure, respectively.
However, when asked about the practice of deportation – something that President Barack Obama’s administration has done in record numbers in the last five years, with some 400,000 being deported annually – the results were split right down the middle. Forty five percent of those surveyed said that they thought deporting undocumented immigrants was a good thing, while an equal number said it was a bad thing.
Democrats, in general, were shown to oppose aggressive deportation far more than their Republican counterparts. About 37% of Democrats said deportation was a good thing, while 53% said it was bad; on the Republican side, the results came to 55% that it was a good thing and 40% that it was bad. Independents were split a little more evenly, with 46% favoring deportation and 43% saying they don’t support it.
But perhaps most importantly, the issue of immigration as a whole has taken a slight dive over the past eight months. In June of last year, 50% of those polled said that passage of immigration reform was an “extremely/very important” item on the political agenda, but that number has now fallen to 49%. Breaking it down further, 46% of Republicans say it’s still extremely/very important, 60% of Democrats feel the same way, and 44% of Independents do as well.
The full results of the Pew Research Center study can be found here.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com
3 Comments
This is bull crap and the American people can see through this sham, how much did it take to buy off PEW? The fine upstanding poll takers that took the poll because Rasmussen says the exact opposite….which means someone is wrong, or they lied
This is bull crap and the American people can see through this sham, how much did it take to buy off PEW? The fine upstanding poll takers that took the poll because Rasmussen says the exact opposite….which means someone is wrong, or they lied straight to our faces
This is bull crap and the American people can see through this sham, how much did it take to buy off PEW? The fine upstanding poll takers that took the poll because Rasmussen says the exact opposite….which means someone is wrong, or they lied