Clear Majority of Public Supports Legal Status for Undocumented

by Dave Bennion · 2009-05-05 20:37:00 UTC
Topics:

Backing up the recent CBS/NY Times poll, a new ABC poll shows a substantial increase in the number of Americans who support legal status for undocumented immigrants (via Yglesias). This is good news for two reasons:

(1) 49% to 61% is a big jump on an issue that most mainstream politicians have been hiding from since 2007. Immigration got branded as a toxic issue even as a consensus has been forming over solutions. Hopefully more politicians will realize it's in their political interest to ignore the fax blitzes coming from a handful of jaded nativists and focus instead on building ties to immigrant communities.

(2) The fact that Matt Yglesias and Ruy Teixeira are blogging about this gives me hope that the mainstream left blogosphere will decide not to cede this issue to Michelle Malkin and Steve Sailer out of sheer exasperation, as seems to have been the case in recent years. Yes, it's a complicated issue, but so are most important policy matters. And the civil rights aspects are clear.  The numbers are not on the side of Rush's dead enders. It shouldn't take much to show how shallow their bluster is, if mainstream progressives realize what the unions and Latin@ groups have already realized: this is something worth fighting for.

Dave Bennion
PREVIOUS STORY:
Seeing Red Over Sotomayor
NEXT STORY:
Community Members Fight Detention of High School Graduate with a Mental Disability

COMMENTS (210)

    [X]

    Comments on Change.org are meant for further exploration and evaluation of the campaign on Change.org. To that end, we welcome constructive comments. However, we reserve the right to delete comments which, as determined solely in our discretion: (1) are offensive, abusive, or off-topic; (2) include content solely intended to personally attack the campaign creator, (3) are designed to subvert or hijack comment threads rather than contribute to them; and/or (4) violate our terms of service and/or privacy policy. Repeat offenders may be permanently removed from the site at our discretion. Please also be advised that: (A) we do not actively curate and/or monitor in any manner whatsoever the comments made on the Change.org platform, and (B) the creator of each campaign on Change.org may remove any comment at her/his/its discretion.