Occupying the Immigration Debate: People may not be as anti-immigrant as we've been led to believe.
An article posted on the Center for American Progress website in December, "The Public's View of Immigration," summarizes five recent U.S. opinion polls. Authors Philip E. Wolgin and Angela Maria Kelley find that while the media and the politicians frantically call for the mass deportation of "illegals," a majority of U.S. adults don't favor the idea of removing all 11 million of the country's unauthorized immigrants. And while immigrant rights advocates don't dare use the word "amnesty," the polls show a majority of the population supporting some form of legalization for many or most of the undocumented -- in other words, they support an amnesty.
These aren't just the opinions of the "liberal elite"; they cut across partisan lines. According to a poll released by the rightwing Fox News network, 57 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of Tea Party supporters back some form of legalization. The results also cut across ethnic lines. African Americans are probably among the U.S. citizens most affected by immigration's impact on jobs and wages, but a National Journal poll found that African Americans were in fact the least likely to support mass deportations and the most likely to back an amnesty for all undocumented immigrants.
Taken together, these five polls "illustrate that the ideological extremism of the hard right is well outside the mainstream pragmatism of the American people," Wolgin and Kelley note. What's most striking about the U.S. public's relatively progressive views on immigration is that at the same time people are astonishingly ignorant about the subject. For all the talk on immigration issues, most people don't know even the most basic facts. A 2010 survey by Transatlantic Trends, for example, found that people here think, on the average, that immigrants make up a staggering 39 percent of the population -- that is, they believe that two out of every five people they see on the street are foreign born. The actual number is around 12.5 percent, about the same as it's been through most of the country's history.
They know that low wages for immigrant workers mean lower wages for the native born; what they don't know is that oppressive anti-immigrant measures like raids, detention, and deportation are what push immigrant wages down. And while racism and xenophobia remain powerful forces in our society, many people are starting to understand how the superrich use divide-and-conquer strategies against the majority. It's not so hard to explain class solidarity to people who are already chanting "We are the 99 percent."
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2012/wilson140212.html
Nice to see evidence that the "the ideological extremism of the hard right is well outside the mainstream pragmatism of the American people". I think we all know it but it is nice to see it proven.
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