Latest CIS Poll on Faith and Immigration Raises Eyebrows

America's Voice Blog

Posted 01/05/10 at 10:00am

Latest CIS Poll on Faith and Immigration Raises Eyebrows

Faith Something is clearly amiss when it comes to the latest Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) polling on immigration. Not that it’s a huge surprise, coming from the same "think tank" whose leader recently argued that Judge Sotomayor should change her name to sound more “Anglo...”

In December, the anti-immigration organization hired the polling firm Zogby International to conduct a survey that claims to have found broad opposition among people of faith for comprehensive immigration reform. While it’s unsurprising that CIS would try to push back against recent public proclamations in support of immigration reform from Catholic, evangelical, and Jewish faith leaders, by steering poll results toward the organization’s desired conclusions, the poll runs smack into some fairly troubling breaches of methodology.

Not only did questions in the CIS-sponsored Zogby poll appear engineered to produce anti-immigration responses, but, most importantly, those who participate in online panels, on which the results were based, are simply not a random sample of the general population in the fashion that a true random digit dial telephone poll is.

So great are the discrepancies that Dr. Robert P. Jones, president of Public Religion Research, concludes in a recent memo:

The CIS/Zogby poll has serious methodological shortcomings, and results should be viewed with considerable caution.

Incidentally, for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Zogby conducted an October 2008 poll of 1,000 U.S. Catholics nationwide that showed broad support for immigration reform. The poll found that “69 percent of Catholics polled supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, provided they register with the government; 62 percent supported the concept if they were required to learn English.”

Instead of the online only, opt-in methodology, the USCCB poll relied on the tried-and-true method of a random telephone sample. In other words, it asked an actual sample of people what they thought.

Also, unlike the CIS-sponsored Zogby poll, the UCCCB Zogby poll results closely track results of other nationwide polls which show that the broad majority of Americans support immigration reform including a legalization component.

But gaping holes in methodology, and thinly-veiled attempts to muddy the water on faith and immigration, are nothing new for the Center for Immigration Studies.

Immigration Impact described CIS’ attack on compassionate faith perspectives this way back in October (responding to a panel they put together last Fall):

For many years now, religious leaders and diverse faith groups have contributed much to the ongoing immigration debate. Grounded in faith and good works, the faith community has been and continues to be steadfast in their outreach to immigrants through a myriad of support and service programs, faith rallies and support of those in need. That being said, there are restrictionist groups who would rather sully the debate by co-opting faith-based terminology and tease anti-immigrant agendas out of Scripture. […]

For many, the principles of their faith drive them to social activism of all kinds and no one—liberal or conservative—has an exclusive claim on the Bible or its interpretation. But what’s troubling about the CIS report is how thinly veiled an effort it is to invoke the Bible as a source of authority for anti-immigrant policies. Immigration policy is about regulating the flow of immigrants into this country, the demands of our economy and the machinations of how we go about processing that flow. The faith community comes to the immigration issue from an important perspective grounded in compassion and justice, and that is a valuable contribution to the debate.

Valuable contributions to the debate, however, are not what the John Tanton-founded Center for Immigration Studies is after.