Methodology To The Madness

Nate Silver takes a look at the methods behind the recent Rasmussen poll on Arizona's new immigration law.  As usual, it depends on how you phrase those poll questions.

And here is how Rasmussen polled on the question:

Do you favor or oppose legislation that authorizes local police to stop and verify the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant?

Granted, there are some ambiguities about what the law actually does. And coming up with the appropriate poll wording for complex questions like these is never easy.

But Rasmussen's portrayal of the law is very gentle. There's no mention of the provisions that liberals and civil libertarians find most odious: that the law would charge legal immigrants with trespassing for failure to carry documentation papers (although -- note -- this is already required under federal law); that it would give law enforcement officers new powers of detention (rather than mere "verification"); that it would allow officers, without a warrant, to arrest people who they suspected might be guilty of offenses that could lead to deportation, and that it would prohibit certain types of work-for-hire involving moving vehicles.

The Rasmussen poll says that 60 percent of Americans (and 70 percent of Arizonans) favor the new law, but how would those numbers change if people were read a longer or more complete description of the measure? Since there's been no other polling on the subject, we have no idea. It wouldn't shock me if the law indeed proved to be popular, especially in Arizona, if a fuller description were read. (Liberals, who uniformly seem to think that the law will be unpopular with certain key demographic groups, are a bit too sanguine about this). But this poll is so simplistic as to provide very little informational value.

To their credit, Rasmussen later asked people whether they were concerned that "efforts to identify and deport illegal immigrants will also end up violating the civil rights of some U.S. citizens"; 58 percent said they were in fact somewhat or very concerned. But that finding did not get their lede, nor was that concern expressed relative to Arizona's law itself.

Simplistic. Yeah, that certainly describes Rasmussen's usual MO.  Taking a complicated issue and then drawing yellow smiley faces on it.  If that what this law did, allow cops to "stop and verify" that would be one thing.  But it forces them to do so.  Rasmussen is almost certainly trying to make the law seem innocuous as possible in order to gain support for it.


If the truth were told about the law being unconstitutional because it doesn't define criteria for what a reasonable suspicion of being illegal is, that it's effectively void for vagueness as a criminal statute because it doesn't specify what officers should do if they FIND someone who is illegal, and it almost certainly violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution on top of all of that, I doubt the law would gain 60% approval.


Has anyone thought all this out?  Mass arrests flooding the deportation infrastructure?  People suing police for violation of civil rights, and also for not checking people stringently enough for the most virulent anti-immigration Arizonans?  Possible violence?  Sweeps through communities?  Cops getting informants and anonymous tips that so-and-so is an illegal?  What about family members of those arrested?  Does this ONLY cover Mexicans in the country illegally?  What if the police bust a Canadian, German, Japanese or Russian in the country illegally?  What about checkpoints?


All of this is a legal nightmare.  Rasmussen is pretending it's just a peachy law with no problems.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Rachel Maddow breaks it down.





This is a hideous law from a legal standpoint, not just a moral one.