Poll: Voters Support Immigration Crackdown

Published July 18, 2010 at 9:16 a.m.

ATLANTA (AP) A majority of Georgia voters would support giving police the power to arrest suspected illegal immigrants who cannot prove they are in the country legally, according to poll results released Saturday.

The survey shows 68 percent of voters would support enacting a law meant to crack down on illegal immigrants similar to one recently adopted in Arizona. That law requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person's immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

About three-quarters of white voters surveyed supported such a move, while 20 percent opposed it and 5 percent were undecided. Roughly 63 percent of Hispanics supported the idea, while less than half of black voters approved.

Views on the issue broke sharply along party lines. The poll showed 86 percent of Republicans would approve of an Arizona-style law, while about half of Democrats would back it. Men tended to support an Arizona-style law more than women.

Steve Newsome of Lincolnton, a retired veteran, said he would support such a law.

``If that Arizona governor was running for president right now, I'd vote for her,'' he said.

Insurance underwriter Michael Smith of Johns Creek opposed getting state and local police involved in immigration enforcement like in Arizona.

``It honestly just doesn't feel like that it is right or the American way,'' he said. ``Plus, how do you even police a law like that without some type of racial profiling?''

Immigration is a hot-button political issue in Georgia, where the federal government estimates the number of illegal immigrants more than doubled to 480,000 from January 2000 to January 2009. All the Republicans running for governor have said they would support an Arizona-style law, while Democratic candidate Roy Barnes said Friday he would sign similar legislation if elected governor.

The poll was conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, Inc. of Washington from July 8 through July 13, and paid for by 13 daily newspapers with readership across Georgia. Researchers polled 625 likely voters on general questions and roughly 400 Democrats and 400 Republicans on questions specific to the primary election. The telephone interviews were randomly selected and distributed across Georgia.

The margin for error is plus or minus 4 percentage points overall, and plus or minus 5 percentage points for each party sample. This means that there is a 95 percent chance that the actual figure would fall in that range if the entire population were sampled.


(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

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