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Great news on illegal immigration in Ohio poll … or is it?
According to a Mason-Dixon poll of Ohio voters reported in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 81 percent of respondents agree with the proposition, “The U.S. needs to strictly control who enters the country and deport people who come here illegally,” while 14 percent agree with the proposition, “The U.S. should welcome immigrants no matter how they got here and offer them a way to become citizens.” What is stunning is that 81 percent are saying not just that immigration needs to be controlled, but that illegals should be deported. I’m all for stepped-up deportation of illegal aliens, not just attrition of the illegal alien population, if there is public support for it. The poll suggests that immigration reformers are being too cautious on this front. On second thought, however, I wonder if the poll results were corrupted by the fact that the two propositions were combined into a single sentence. Would the Yes response still have been 81 percent if the sentence was: “The U.S. needs to deport people who come here illegally”? It seems to me that to get accurate results a poll should not combine two assertions into one question, because respondents may only be responding to the first question. It’s like asking people to agree or disagree with this sentence: “I believe in God and that God literally created the world in seven days as is told in Genesis.” Now lots of people who believe the first clause do not believe the second clause, but if the only alternative to agreeing with the entire sentence is to say that they don’t believe in God, they will say that they agree with the sentence, even though they don’t believe the whole sentence. I made this point recently to a liberal acquaintance who was appalled at a poll showing that a majority of the American people believe in creationism; I told him that what they were really saying was that they believe in God. A further and more serious problem with the Mason-Dixon question is that the two statements that were presented to respondents were not absolute, but relative. Preceding the two sentences is the question: “Which one of the following comes closer to your view on the issue of immigration”? [Emphasis added.] So the 81 percent were not actually saying that they believe that “The U.S. needs to strictly control who enters the country and deport people who come here illegally,” They were only saying that that sentence comes closer to their own view than the sentence “The U.S. should welcome immigrants no matter how they got here and offer them a way to become citizens.”
Note also that I was only able to engage in this kind of analysis because the Plain Dealer included the original wording of the poll question. In the overwhelming majority of cases, news organs do not include the original wording, making it impossible to know how reliable the often sensational reported result really is. Email entry |