The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
One stand-out polling lesson from the 2024 election was the danger of over-relying on single surveys, especially when specific findings (Harris ahead in Iowa) depart from generally accepted reality. On sensitive matters, it’s become far too tempting for pundits to seize on an outlier result as evidence for something definitive, while laying aside other details and other data.
This is happening with faith journalism too. For instance, in one survey recently picked up by the media, it was reported that “nearly a third of U.S. Latter-day Saints agree that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the nation.” But that’s not what the survey asked. Respondents were asked whether they support the following: “The immigrants entering the country illegally today are poisoning the blood of our country” (emphasis our own).
The notion of the blood of a country being “poisoned” by any particular group has an unquestionably dark history. Closing paragraphs of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf warn about an “age of racial poisoning” — with the text inveighing against “every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples” (including any Jew who he says “poisons the blood of others”). It was this so-called “blood poisoning” that Hitler argued was the root of “all great cultures of the past perish(ing).”
A larger context of darkening American attitudes towards immigrants
Observers, therefore, are not wrong to raise concern at anyone, of any group, adopting similarly hostile attitudes. Although Americans have generally held positive attitudes toward immigration in recent decades, that has shifted over the past few years, with surveys repeatedly showing most Americans unhappy with the border crisis and immigration surging to the top of Gallup’s “most important problem” list among surveyed Americans. This is especially true of conservatives and people of faith, with Republican concerns over immigration at an “all time high,” according to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
But in grappling with a pathway forward as a country, it’s crucial to have a clear understanding of available data. And as survey researchers know well, how exactly a question is worded can drastically change the responses received. In this case, PRRI framed its question in terms of illegal immigration, clearly cuing respondents to remark on immigrants who are, by definition, people engaging in at least one illegal act.
The survey question was, knowingly or not, worded in such a way as to conjure up images of more than just illegally crossing the border, hinting towards smugglers, sex traffickers, and such to prime people towards giving an anti-immigrant response. Given the way the question is asked, we are not surprised that it incurred responses making a substantial minority of Americans sound xenophobic.
That includes 19% of Black Protestants, 23% of Jews and 27-30% of Hispanic Catholics and Protestants, showing a surprisingly sizable number of these ethnic minorities also expressing agreement with the same statement.
Since most still believe that immigration needs to happen legally, it’s perhaps understandable that sizable subsets endorse a survey question expressing premonitions about the impact of illegal entry. But it’s also important to note that the best data pushes back on the excessive criminality of those illegally entering the country. One analysis of Texas records found undocumented immigrants arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens. And research out of Stanford dating back to the 1960s found immigrants 60% less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S.
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
