Sunday, July 13th, 2008...2:07 pm
Americans Prefer People Who Navigate Soviet-Style Bureaucracies
Thirty-nine percent of Americans think current levels of immigration are about right, and the percentage of people who think we ought to let in more foreigners is as high as it has been in 20 years.
Meanwhile, it’s impossible to know what this means. Do 39 percent of people think the actual number of immigrants coming over the border is ideal, and thus support very large increases in legal immigration quotas? (Thirty-nine percent would be an astonishingly high number if this were so.) Most people probably think current legal immigration quotas are about right, and it’s time to start enforcing them. Most people also have no idea what percentage of the Latino immigrants they encounter are legally documented.
Other Gallup polls indicate that 64 percent of people think “immigration is a good thing” but 63 percent think undocumented workers don’t “pay their fair share” in taxes. I suspect that if we doubled legal immigration quotas and told no one, Americans would continue to report that the status quo is just dandy but illegal aliens remain a criminal menace.
3 Comments
July 14th, 2008 at 7:44 am
I’m pretty sure these numbers mean nothing, since even the average educated American has no $&%@ing clue how ridiculous the legal immigration process actually is. When my (Canadian) wife and I tell people how much it has cost us, how much time it has taken, and that we still aren’t done with it yet (we applied almost a year ago) the typical response is that we must have screwed it up somehow, and overlooked the “easy” way in for Canucks married to Americans.
What’s really scary is that being a Canadian married to an American probably *is* the easiest way in…
July 16th, 2008 at 2:58 am
Over a year? More than $500? Yup, you must’ve screwed up somehow.
July 17th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
I would be interested to know how the % of people who think we should increase immigration breaks down over immigrant/non-immigrant demographics. Immigrants and children of immigrants (particularly Latinos) are rapidly becoming a larger component of our population, percentage-wise. Thus, I would not think it surprising that the percentage of people favoring more immigration would increase.
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