A national poll of Hispanic voters found that 89 percent support President Obama’s decision to go around Congress and grant legal status to up to 5 million illegal immigrants.
Conducted Nov. 20 to 22 by Latino Decisions, the poll also found that 80 percent of the 405 Hispanic voters surveyed oppose congressional Republicans’ plans to defund Obama’s executive actions.
The three organizations that paid for the poll also advocate a path to citizenship, what many opponents call amnesty, for illegal immigrants.
So not so fast, some observers say. Paul Waldman in The Washington Post’s “Plum Line” political blog, for example, writes:
The people at Latino Decisions are highly respected political scientists (and, full disclosure, one of them is a close friend of mine). But frankly, the key question on this survey sure looks like it’s designed to maximize positive responses.
Although Waldman counts himself among those who consider Latino Decisions a reliable source of information about public opinion among Hispanics, he says the survey’s structure may have created misleading results.
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The 89 percent figure, for example, was in response to this question:
President Obama has said that Congress had many chances to pass an immigration bill and they failed. Now Obama has enacted executive action to provide relief from deportation for any undocumented immigrant who has not committed a crime, has lived here 5 or more years and is a parent of a U.S. citizen or legal resident child here in the U.S., and providing them with temporary work permits to they have legal status. Do you support or oppose President Obama taking this executive action?
The first sentence in that question presents one side of the debate over what to do about millions of illegal immigrants. Pollsters say that if a poll uses an argument to ask a question, it is common practice also to use the other side of the argument.
In this case, the Latino Decisions poll did not go on to ask something like: “Republicans say Obama is acting outside his authority by taking this action without congressional approval.”
Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster and co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, described the Latino Decisions poll as “not biased, but tilted.”
“They wrote it as if they were trying to get the results they wanted,” Newhouse said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “The numbers may have been the same if they had played it straight, but we don’t know.”
On Thursday, Obama announced that he will change the immigration system by giving millions of illegal immigrants a reprieve from deportation and a chance to get work permits.
The Latino Decisions poll found that 64 percent of respondents have friends, family members, coworkers or acquaintances who are here illegally.
The poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percent, compiled the responses of randomly selected Hispanic registered voters nationwide.
The organizations that commissioned the poll are Presente.org, an online organizing group; the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, a network of community groups; and Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, a civic participation group.
This report has been modified.