GOP Voters Support Path to Citizenship for Undocumented Immigrants

I've written about how some conservative writers don't believe the GOP punditry's embrace of immigration restrictionism is in the party's long-term interest, and about how those fears are now being born out as Latin@ support for the GOP plummets.

But the great mystery in all of this is that GOP voters themselves support common sense solutions for immigration reform.  America's Voice publicized a recent poll last week:

A new fact sheet from America's Voice shows that, despite inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom and the extremist rhetoric of some Republicans in Congress, self-identified Republican voters strongly support comprehensive immigration reform. Polling conducted by Benenson Strategy Group demonstrates that, like all Americans, Republican voters believe immigration reform to be a serious and important problem for Washington to address now, not later.  Despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, Republican voters also overwhelmingly support comprehensive immigration reform, reject enforcement-only approaches and believe that comprehensive reform will help the economy.

This point was especially interesting:

When given three choices for how to deal with the 12 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, 62% of Republicans said “They should be required to register, meet certain conditions, and eventually be allowed to apply for citizenship.” Eight percent of Republicans said “They should be legally allowed to stay on a temporary basis but not allowed to become U.S. citizens,” and 28% said “They must leave the country.”

Voter preferences on this issue are clear, and even in the Republican Party, those preferences are to pass common sense immigration reform with a path to citizenship.  This outcome doesn't seem to be impacted much by the number of times Sean Hannity repeats the word "amnesty" on Fox News.

Update: Also see Greg Siskind's analysis of these poll results:

This tells me that the vocal critics of reform in the GOP fall in to one of three groups -

1. Those that genuinely oppose immigration reform and simply don't care what their constituents think;

2. Those that understand the numbers but are elevating in importance the vocal minority that spends their days faxing, emailing and calling the Hill.

3. Those that are misreading the sentiment of the bulk of their supporters and falsely assume that the faxers represent the typical voter.

I suspect most of them are in the third category and if they don't wake up soon, they'll find themselves in even worse political shape than they are today.