Here are the first two grafs of an article in today’s Los Angeles Times …
One-third of Americans want to deny social services, including public schooling and emergency room healthcare, to illegal immigrants, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
Still, in a sign of ambivalence among voters about the emotionally charged issue, a strong bipartisan majority — 60% — favors allowing illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements.
That second number is a pretty striking statistic when you think of all the media we see about how everybody’s fed up with illegals, wants them all marched back out of the country and then have the whole place surrounded by a hundred foot fence.
What I think says pretty clearly is that the kind of rabid hostility to illegal immigration and illegal immigrants — which is in most cases, I believe, just a fig leaf for hostility to all immigrants in generall — just isn’t a majority position in this country.
It’s definitely an issue which creates tensions and conflicts within the Democratic coalition. But fundamentally the anti-immigrant rage of the GOP is a minority position. And it’s one that I suspect will do the GOP vast damage over the coming years as hispanics swing heavily back toward the Democratic party.
