Spinning a poll - how would you deal with illegal aliens?
Gallup has resorted to clever wording in a recent poll which implicitly spins polling results. In the February 17, 2014 poll "In U.S., Border Security, Immigrant Status Equally Important - Americans gave border security higher priority in past," Gallup reports that:
Americans now assign about equal importance to the two major aspects of immigration reform being debated in Washington. Forty-four percent say it is extremely important for the U.S. to develop a plan to deal with the large number of immigrants already living in the United States, and 43% say it's extremely important to halt the flow of illegal immigrants into the country by securing the borders. This is a shift from the past, when Americans were consistently more likely to rate border security as extremely important...
Gallup then softly editorializes in support of legalization / amnesty for illegal aliens:
In the past, Americans gave a higher priority to securing U.S. borders, but they now rate dealing with illegal immigrants already in the country as equally important, if not more so, when forced to choose. The relative importance of the two would matter less if Congress and the president were able to agree on comprehensive legislation that dealt with both issues.
Yet an examination of the poll questions and results reveals some interesting framing of the questions:
24. How important is it to you that the government takes steps this year to deal with each of the following - extremely important, very important, moderately important, or not that important? How about:
A. Controlling U.S. borders to halt the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S.
B. Developing a plan to deal with the large number of illegal immigrants who are already living in the U.S.
25. If you had to choose, what should be the main focus of the U.S. government in dealing with the issue of illegal immigration – developing a plan for halting the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S., or developing a plan to deal with immigrants who are currently in the U.S illegally?
These cleverly-worded questions reveal implicit polling bias. Both these key questions pose "developing a plan" to deal with illegal aliens as one of the choices. But that could be interpreted by respondents as either:
a) Developing a plan to ensure that illegal aliens can not steal jobs from Americans and receive taxpayer-subsidized benefits, and are encouraged to return to their home countries to reunite with their families, or
b) Developing a plan to give amnesty and citizenship to illegal aliens.
The interpretation is left to the respondent. Respondents who favored enforcement of existing immigration law as well as radical open borders respondents would have felt comfortable responding with "developing a plan". As a result, Gallup could combine the count of responses in favor of law enforcement with responses in favor of legalization / amnesty.
Noticeably absent from the polling questions was the option that would have provided more definitive, accurate, and downright honest polling results:
C. Developing a plan to ensure that illegal aliens can not steal jobs from Americans and receive taxpayer-subsidized benefits, and are encouraged to return to their home countries to reunite with their families.
The mainstream media (MSM) obligingly latched on to this cleverly-designed push poll with articles such as CNN's Polls: Public's immigration priorities changing and Fox News Latino's Legalization trumps border security in poll, which further twisted polling results by stating that:
More Americans every day believe that resolving the immigration status of the undocumented is more important than strengthening border security...
In actuality, not much has changed. Gallup has produced tailor-made push polling results which the mainstream media obligingly spun into pro-amnesty stories - no thinking required.
Additional reading:
Let’s “deal with” this Gallup poll!, Daily Caller, February 18, 2014
It saves time and confusion, when you are trying to understand MSM polls on immigration, if you start from the premise that they are designed to produce the amnesty the MSM consensus favors...
From this mess, Gallup’s professionals managed to extract a story line guaranteed to find a ready-made audience among reporters and editors who share the amnesty-first Beltway Consensus.