SOMETIMES A BOOGEYMAN is just that -- a boogeyman. Consider the dreaded A-word: amnesty. It's hard to think of a word that scares today's elected officials more. Yet it turns out that voters -- Democrats and Republicans -- are much less knee-jerk about the word and what lies behind it than most politicians think.
In the last year or so, the Manhattan Institute has conducted several polls on immigration, and at first we stayed away from questions about what we thought was a misleading buzzword. But in the last few months, as more people have warmed to the package of reforms favored by President Bush and the Senate -- combining tougher border and workplace enforcement with more worker visas and a path to legalization for the illegal immigrants already here -- we wanted to put that package to the hardest possible test, and we started asking about the A-word.
What we found: No one likes amnesty. No one wants to reward illegal behavior or encourage more of it in years ahead. But voters are so hungry to solve the problem of illegal immigration, to retake control of the border and restore the rule of law where they live, that they are willing to accept even something they consider to be amnesty.
This is the way the Manhattan Institute and the National Immigration Forum put the question in a poll released this week: "Which would you prefer: Congress does nothing about immigration reform this year, or Congress passes an immigration reform bill that provides for increased border security and tougher enforcement but also contains things you do not like, such as amnesty for current illegal immigrants?"
The results: 55% of likely voters want to do the pragmatic thing -- recognize this underground population and bring it onto the right side of the law -- as opposed to 33% who would rather stand pat and ignore the problem. (In fact, Republicans favor pragmatism more strongly than Democrats. And last month, in an earlier poll, when the institute asked likely GOP voters what they thought about the Senate bill, 39% said that a package that included legalization was amnesty -- but 75% supported it anyway.)
Other surveys find much the same thing, albeit without using the dreaded shibboleth. In the past three months, virtually every major media outlet has conducted a poll on immigration, and the results are remarkably uniform. Yes, Americans are deeply troubled by the illegal influx. Yes, they want tougher, more effective enforcement. But voters also see, and perhaps it's only common sense, that we as a nation cannot hope to solve the problem of illegal immigration without dealing with the 12 million illegal immigrants already living and working here.
