Thread: Americans Favor Immigration Bill ------What??????????

"By a small margin, they may prefer attrition versus some path to citizenship as being discussed in the Senate bill.

Doesn't sound like they favor it at ALL!

Here's the article:

Ronald Kessler
Monday, June 25, 2007

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When the details are fully explained, an overwhelming majority of Americans favor the immigration bill being debated in the Senate, Ed Goeas, president and CEO of The Tarrance Group, tells me.

The Tarrance Group is a Republican polling and strategy firm that works for Rudy Giuliani, 47 congressmen, 10 senators, and five governors.

Without referring to the Senate bill itself or using terms like "amnesty" that are open to interpretation, the firm polled Americans on whether they would favor its components.

"When we walked through the series of measures that are being proposed, we got 77 percent of Republicans, 72 percent of Democrats, and 70 percent of independents supporting it," says Goeas (pronounced GO-as). "There's not a piece of research I've seen that, if you explain each one of those pieces, you don't get a majority saying they approve it." Several issues are at play, Goeas says.

"One issue is clearly a demand and desire by voters, and I think by politicians, to secure our borders and stop illegal immigration," he says. "The second issue is that we truly need to increase legal immigration to meet our country's economic needs. Any economist worth his or her salt will tell you that having an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent is equivalent to 100 percent employment. Everyone else is in transition."

While many believe that anything short of rounding up the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and sending them back home is amnesty, "Amnesty isn't necessarily a reason not to support a solution," Goeas says.

"If you in fact are making them pay a penalty, learn English, have a job, pay taxes, and if they can't show that they've been paying taxes even by a different name, to pay back taxes, to learn English, the overwhelming majority believe that that is not amnesty," Goeas says. "It so often is misportrayed as amnesty."

Interestingly, while Republicans are perceived to be the biggest opponents of the pending proposals, "You actually have a larger group composed of Democrats, a lot of union members, and a lot of the African-American voters being very anti-any kind of pro-immigration," Goeas notes.

However, "Most voters agree that sending them all home is not realistic," Goeas says. "By a small margin, they may prefer attrition versus some path to citizenship as being discussed in the Senate bill. But attrition to be fully effective could be anywhere from eight to 10 years before we've kind of weeded out all these illegal immigrants, which means that you've failed on securing inside our borders."

The larger issue is how the immigration debate will affect the future of the Republican Party and its ability to capture the White House and Congress. As the proportion of Hispanics grows, winning them over to the Republican Party becomes even more critical.

"Bush won 35 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2000." Goeas says. "In 2004, he won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, even though they increased from 9 percent of the total votes cast to 11 percent of the total votes cast. And so of Bush's 3.2 percent margin of victory in 2004, a full 2 percent of it, or over half, came from his increase with the Hispanic vote. In 2006, we dropped to only 30 percent of the Hispanic vote."

What worries Goeas is that "from some surveys, we have seen many of the Hispanics viewing what we as Republicans say about immigration as anti-Hispanic when we talk about these immigrants with the tone and the tenor that we do," Goeas says.

They must have been polling illegal aliens not US citizens! I have not talked to anyone that supports this bill!!!

Lies, lies, lies!!! Hold a National Election for AMERICANS ONLY and they will quickly find out what legal citizens REALLY think! I don't know of ONE single person who is for the Bill. Not one!