Friday, May 25, 2007

Ve Have Vays of Making You Answer Correctly   [Mark Krikorian]

The Upper West Side's community daily shocks America by finding that the public favors amnesty. To see the actual questions, you have to go to the CBS News site, and there you find the same mistake as in other MSM polls; at the beginning of the section on illegal immigration (see Q61), they offer only two choices — either "most illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States for at least two years [where did they get "two years" from? — MK] ... should be given a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status" or they should be "deported back to their native country". This ignores the actual alternative to amnesty, newly embraced by George Will and Peggy Noonan, which is to enforce the law and permit the illegal population to decline through attrition. My research director talked to a pollster a few weeks back at a major polling organization about this specific issue, and that guy said they just read the newspapers to see what they should ask people about, and all he'd seen in the papers was politcians offering the choice between amnesty and mass deportations.

A less overtly political organization than the Times, Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, has also just done a poll with more balanced questions, finding a preference for attrition. And Rasmussen's recent poll that found only 26 percent support for the bill, actually asked about the bill, rather than just about various disembodied possibilities.

05/25 08:39 AMShare