Public, Bush split on illegals

ARTESIA, N.M. — President Bush has been making a strong push for illegal aliens to assimilate as he stumps for passage of a plan to legalize most of them, but a new poll shows that voters actually want less immigration and more security.

And even Mr. Bush’s own pollster, in another recent poll, failed to ask about a pathway to citizenship, instead focusing on temporary legal status for illegal aliens — a concept Mr. Bush no longer endorses.

About half of those surveyed in the new poll by MWR Strategies said the immigration problem facing the U.S. is “too much immigration,” while just 29 percent identified the problem as “not enough assimilation.”

Michael McKenna, who conducted the poll of 1,000 registered voters, said it suggests that Mr. Bush is moving in the wrong direction by embracing a path to citizenship.

“The practical import of it is, all this yak-yak about path to citizenship — more than half the population looks at it and says there’s just too much. We need less of it,” he said.

“If you think the problem is just too much immigration, you don’t care about path to citizenship or any of that other stuff.”

When asked the best way to address immigration, 36 percent said penalize businesses for hiring illegal aliens, while 35 percent said create a path to citizenship and 17 percent said build a wall.

The Bush administration has been trying to convince skeptical Republicans in Congress that voters prefer a comprehensive solution to immigration and back Mr. Bush, who yesterday said a consensus is building in Congress for the major elements of his immigration proposal, including a path to citizenship.

A recent memo by Matthew Dowd, Mr. Bush’s pollster and a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee (RNC), argues that “the comprehensive approach that emphasizes both security and compassion is unifying, not polarizing — it is supported by Republicans, independents, and Democrats.”

But Mr. Dowd didn’t ask about a path to citizenship, which opponents call “amnesty,” in his most recent survey, taken after Mr. Bush made his Oval Office address to the nation arguing for that proposal. Instead, Mr. Dowd asked about temporary workers, who would return home.

Mr. Dowd is advising Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s re-election campaign in California and was unavailable, according to the RNC. But a party official, who asked not to be named, said they simply didn’t ask about that part of Mr. Bush’s plan.

“The survey clearly asks about a comprehensive approach to immigration. We did not ask support questions regarding path to citizenship in this particular poll,” the official said.

Mr. McKenna criticized Mr. Dowd’s memo, saying it’s “not inaccurate as far as it goes, but it’s sure misleading.”

“The questions themselves are clearly skewed, don’t come to the heart of the issue in any important kind of way and are clearly biased in favor of one side,” he said. “The weight of the numbers and the weight of the evidence suggests that people’s main concern is border security and they view most of these proposals as amnesty.”

Those who support a middle-ground route of giving illegal aliens temporary status but not a path to citizenship said Mr. Dowd’s polling actually supports their plan.

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