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POLL: When It Comes To Immigration Most Americans Have No Clue What They're Talking About At All

Aug 5, 2013, 23:43 IST

When it comes to immigration, most Americans have no clue what they're talking about, a new Business Insider/SurveyMonkey poll has found.

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We ran a poll that asked respondents — in this case, American workers in industries that are heavily dependent on either high-skill or low-skill workers — about their feelings about immigration reform.

SurveyMonkey, an online pollster, has enjoyed considerable success in meeting or exceeding the performance of traditional phone-based pollsters.

One question we asked was "Over the past 3 - 5 years, what do you believe about the undocumented immigrant population in the United States?"

The survey of 1,018 respondents found that a whopping 66% of respondents — two in three — believe that the unauthorized immigrant population had increased somewhat or significantly over the past three to five years.

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Only around 10% of respondents gave the correct answer: the unauthorized immigrant population had in fact decreased somewhat.

Business Insider / Surveymonkey poll

Experts agree that — primarily due to the recession — the undocumented immigrant population in the United States has decreased significantly since its peak in 2007.

Pew Research Hispanic CenterThis chart from the Pew Hispanic Center shows the estimates: While the U.S. immigrant population has continued to grow, the undocumented immigrant population has seen a marked decline from 12.0 million undocumented immigrants in 2007 to 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in 2011, a roughly 7.5% decrease.

The 22% of respondents who said the undocumented immigrant population has stayed the same can be forgiven as the population only declined a little over the last five years, and for the last three years it's been flat.

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Still, since two out of every three respondents incorrectly believe that the unauthorized immigrant population is growing — when the electorate is by and large just plain wrong on the facts — it's easy to understand why immigration reform has been such a hard sell.

It's also easy to understand why members of Congress have been so eager to lard up the immigration bill with border security spending: They're pandering to an electorate that still thinks illegal immigration is rising.

Here are a few caveats for the data. The remainder of the survey — which we'll be releasing later this week — looks at the difference in views about immigration between high- and low- skill workers.

As a result, this survey wasn't sent out to the general population. Instead we targeted workers in 11 different industries: Agriculture, Automotive, Construction, Education, Finance, Food & Beverage, Health care, Manufacturing, Nonprofit, Telecommunications, and Energy.

So it's possible the survey isn't totally representative of the general population. It's also disproportionately male (62%) because of the makeup of the surveyed industries.

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