April 13, 2007

Ruy Teixeira, polling "expert", agenda-driven hack

Ruy Teixeira writes for the site Donkey Rising [1] and he's a Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation and the Center for American Progress. And, as an example of the type of "analysis" he offers, let's look at his "Public Opinion Snapshot: Tough but Fair on Immigration" [2]:

...while the public is certainly supportive of stronger immigration enforcement, it is also very supportive of reforming the immigration system to deal with undocumented immigrants who are already here, including providing a path to citizenship... These sentiments were captured in an early March Gallup poll, which asked: "Which comes closest to your view about what government policy should be toward illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States? Should the government deport all illegal immigrants back to their home country, allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States in order to work but only for a limited amount of time, or allow illegal immigrants to remain in the United States and become U.S. citizens but only if they meet certain requirements over a period of time?"

He also mentions similar January 2007 Pew Research Center November 2006 Quinnipiac University polls.

What he doesn't mention is that those polls may be offering some degree of a false choice, pretending that our only options are "deporting all illegal aliens" and some form of amnesty or "guest" worker scheme. Obviously, it's impossible to deport all illegal aliens, and there are also things we could do to cause many of them to self-deport.

And, none of the polls I've seen ask follow-up questions, such as "would you continue to support legalization knowing that it would almost certainly lead to more illegal immigration, in addition to even more power inside the U.S. for the Mexican government as well as more political power for racial demagogues?"

Teixeira is simply taking biased, simplistic polls and using them to support his pre-existing agenda.

[1] emergingdemocraticmajorityweblog.com/donkeyrising
[2] americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/opinion_immigration.html

Posted to Immigration2007a at April 13, 2007 02:31 PM