Another Amnesty Atrocity: Immigration Enthusiasts Torture Helpless Poll Questions!
The
ignominious reversal nine days ago of the Senate`s
cave-in on illegal immigration doesn`t mean the danger
is over. The Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista
coalition remains in control of the corporate media and
is thus well-situated to try to use the
illegal alien demonstrators
in the streets to intimidate America.
For example, the Rupert
Murdoch-subsidized
Weekly Standard continues
to pound the drums for the neocon Grand Strategy of
Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World. Editor Bill
Kristol displayed his contempt for patriotic
conservatives alarmed by illegal immigration in his
notoriously febrile April 10th editorial "Y
for Yahoo." Kristol`s disdain for the average
American, whose sons are doing most of the
fighting and
dying in Kristol`s war in Iraq, is manifest, as
Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus pointed out in "S
for Snob."
Two weeks later in the Weekly
Standard, bootlicking Bush acolyte Fred Barnes,
author of the
unintentionally comic paean to the President,
Rebel-in-Chief, announced in "Bordering
on a Victory" that "The immigration issue has
flipped in President Bush`s favor." Barnes claimed
portentously:
"The
upshot is that an immigration bill appears likely (but
not certain) to pass when Congress returns from its
Easter recess on April 24–and probably in a
"comprehensive" form congenial to Bush and Republican
congressional leaders."
As evidence, Barnes quotes:
"Once
the [Senate Judiciary] committee acted, `the
polls, indeed the whole atmosphere, changed to the
pro-immigrant side," says Jeffrey Bell, a
Republican consultant working for La Raza, the
Hispanic civil rights group."
Note whom Barnes` trusted source
Bell is working for: La Raza! In English, of course,
"La Raza" means "The
Race“, a term
promoted by the Mexican government to assert the
claim that mestizos are the racially superior
ideal mixture of the best of the Indian and white
races.
So what about the new polls
supposedly supporting the cave-in?
For decades,
voter surveys have consistently shown that the public is
outraged by the extent of illegal immigration. For
example, in a
CBS News poll last October, 75 percent said
the government was
“not doing enough”
to keep out illegal aliens, while 15 percent
were satisfied and merely 4 percent thought efforts were
too restrictive.
Obviously, this is not a
satisfactory result from the point of view of the Open
Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista coalition. Fortunately
for them, when it comes to specific mechanisms for
enforcing this broad consensus, there is ample room to
confuse and mislead the public by torturing the poll
questions.
I spent over a decade and a half in
the marketing research industry, and I`ve learned how
hard it is to conduct a survey that elicits honest
answers on any topic, much less one where the media
routinely denigrates one side as "yahoos".
For example, merely having employees with accents
conduct the questioning is likely to bias the answers
severely, since most Americans are quite polite.
The plain fact is, however, that in
the privacy of the voting booth, 56 percent of Arizonans
voted for Proposition 200 to crack down on illegal
immigration in 2004, just as 59 percent of Californians
voted for Proposition 187 in 1994.
The liberal
Los Angeles Times has gotten a lot of publicity
lately for its April 13th poll, which strikes me as a
classic example of writing questions to get the
responses you wanted. In the marketing research
business, you`d lose clients by doing work so shoddy,
but this poll suits the Times` agenda. [Most
Back Tighter Border and a Guest-Worker Plan by
Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer April 13,
2006]
Let`s look in detail at the three
proposals offered:
Create
a guest-worker program that would give a temporary visa
to noncitizens who want to legally work in the U.S.
Support: 54%
Oppose:
21%
Don`t
know: 25%
There are several obvious problems
with this question.
- The word "legally" serves
no logical purpose in the question. Instead, its role
is to distract opponents of illegal immigration, to
convey the message: "These aren`t illegal aliens
we`re talking about! These are people who want to work
legally. Legally."
- The word "noncitizens" is
intentionally vague. Exactly who are these
people who would get the temporary visas?
Legally resident noncitizens already in America?
Illegal aliens? Foreigners living in their own
countries? There`s no way to tell. You are invited to
agree with whatever policy you believe is being
advocated here.
- Most hopelessly confusing of
all, however, is that this statement could well be
interpreted, quite rationally, as calling for mass
deportations. This proposal is for a "temporary
visa" for a "guest-worker" who will be here
"legally". The
essential attribute of a "guest"
is that
eventually he leaves. This emphasis on the limited
duration of the guest-worker`s stay in America
logically implies a mechanism for making him
leave when his temporary visa expires—in other
words,
deportation. Delayed deportation, but deportation
nonetheless … which would be much stricter than the
current system of
Ollie Ollie Home Free once the illegal immigrant
penetrate a few dozen miles north of the border.
Without a system of deportation,
this whole proposal is fraudulent.
Now, you know and I know, and the
people proposing a guest worker program know, that
fraudulent is exactly what this is intended to be. A
guest-worker program would be another
old shell game scam, just like the 1986
amnesty-employer sanction "compromise", which
turned out to be amnesty-only when
enforcement was gutted by corrupt Congressional
pressure on the INS to go easy on campaign contributors
who were employing large numbers of illegal aliens
But millions of Americans are
unaware of this shameful past and disgraceful
present. After all, who`s going to tell them? The LA
Times?
Next question:
Allow
undocumented immigrants who have been living and working
in the U.S. for a number of years, with no criminal
record, to start a path to citizenship.”
Support: 66%
Oppose:
18%
Don`t
know: 16%
- You`ll note that the word
"amnesty" is nowhere mentioned. For over two years
now, President Bush has been trying to redefine "amnesty"
to mean the only thing about the whole cave-in that he
claims he`s against: starting illegal immigrants on a
path to citizenship. So, this is "amnesty" even
by Bush`s absurdly narrow definition. But, for some
reason, the LA Times forgot to include the word
"amnesty" in the proposal.
- One notorious problem with
survey research is that a sizable fraction of
respondents try to be nice to pollsters and tell them
what they want to hear. Some of the politically
savvier participants in the poll will realize that the
pollster`s use of the
euphemism "undocumented" for "illegal"
is a dead-certain giveaway that they are supposed to
answer "Support".
- But lots of other respondents
aren`t terribly familiar with the term "undocumented".
They don`t realize it means "illegal". They
reason: "If the question was about illegal
immigrants, well, then it would ask about `illegal
immigrants.` And if they were illegal immigrants,
they`d, by definition, have a criminal record, right?
So, these are innocent people who, apparently, have
misplaced some documents. And we don`t want to waste
time harassing them. It`s the illegal immigrants we`ve
got to concentrate on doing something about!"
- Exactly where do the
"undocumented" get to "start a path to
citizenship"? Here? Or back home in their native
countries? It doesn`t say.
You know and I know etc. that
"start a path to citizenship" is a euphemism for
"immediately get the privilege of living in America
forever, and get to start
bringing in their relatives, and if they
feel like it, they
eventually get to vote too." But that`s not
what it says.
- The phrase "start a path to
citizenship" has been carefully crafted to
mislead, to make it sound like the illegals are
embarking on some arduous journey of the soul that
will
mold them into
true-blue Americans. And who could be against
that? The reality, of course, is
quite different.
Next question:
“Fence
off hundreds of miles of the border between the U.S. and
Mexico and make it a felony to enter illegally."
Support: 42%
Oppose:
35%
Don`t
know: 23%
This is the only proposal that`s
not weasel-worded into meaningless ambiguousness. It
contains none of the euphemisms of the two policies that
the LA Times favors. It`s been phrased to
shock—as the Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista Lobby
expected—the sensitivities of the public.
But still it passed! America
wants a fence!
And America does not want an
amnesty—as the GOP will find out the hard way if it lets
lobbyists and ideologues bamboozle it over the
amnesty cliff.
[Steve Sailer [email
him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily
blog.]


