More Misleading Information from the Media:
Bad news for Ann Coulter: South Carolina and New Hampshire exit polls suggest most Republican voters don’t agree with her on immigration. . . . Coulter and her crew want you to believe that immigration is the overriding issue in Trump’s rise. . . . Perhaps more devastating to the immigration absolutist thesis of Trump’s rise, most voters indicated they would support what Coulter and her friends would call an “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.” – dailycaller.com, Jamie Weinstein, 2/20/16
Fact Check: In South Carolina the exit poll cited by Weinstein found that 53 percent of the GOP voters favored a program of legalization (amnesty) as opposed to deportation. In New Hampshire the total was 56 percent in favor of legalization. These results prove little, however, because they only provide two rigidly defined options, with deportation appearing as the more harsh and difficult one.
As the Center for Immigration Studies notes, “Polls on immigration seem to frame the debate to get the desired result. If you ask people: what you prefer, giving [illegal aliens] legal status if they jump through hoops, or rounding them all up in a ww2 style deportation, obviously most will prefer the former. It’s a little like asking people, what do you prefer: a trip to the dentist or the proctologist? I’ll take the dentist, thank you very much.”
The truth of the matter is that an immediate massive roundup of illegal aliens, now estimated at 11 million, really isn’t a good idea. It would be quite costly, as well as socially and economically disruptive. But there is another option. It is called attrition through enforcement, a policy of slowly but surely increasing immigration law enforcement so that most illegal aliens will decide to go home on their own—what might be called self deportation.
The key to this strategy would be use of the E-Verify system and other measures to make it harder for illegal aliens to get employment in the U.S. Without jobs they would have strong incentive to return home. History shows an example where stricter enforcement prompted a wave of self deportation. In 1954 Eisenhower administration directed the Border Patrol to crack down on illegal immigration. The operation resulted in the apprehension of 120,000 illegal aliens, while prompting as many as a million others to go home on their own.
Has any polling been done on attrition through enforcement? Indeed it has. The Pulse Opinion Research posed it to likely voters it as an alternative to legalization. It found that 58 percent favored attrition though enforcement, while only 31 percent endorsed amnesty.