Immigration Polling Results

The 14^th Amendment ensures that anyone, who is a legal resident of the United States, is guaranteed their rights. For example, they cannot be discriminated against. This amendment also ensures that anyone who is born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, which includes children of both legal and illegal residents.

1.Do you believe that the 14^th Amendment should be changed/repealed?

            a) Yes

            b) No

            c) I don’t know

            d) Don’t care

2. Do you think that immigration is among the top issues that should be focused on right now?

a)      Yes

b)      No

c)      I don’t know

d)     Don’t care

3. Do you favor or oppose Arizona’s new immigration law, SB1070?

a)      Favor
b)      Oppose
c)      I don’t know

d)     Don’t care

Many people argue that illegal immigration is good for the economy because it fills low-wage jobs, pays sales tax and creates larger pools of consumers. Others, however, argue about there being fewer jobs for Americans and the burdens on tax-based resources.

4. Do you think that we should:

a)      Deport any illegals that we find in our country back to their home country

b)      Grant them citizenship so they can continue on with their lives

c)      Imprison them for breaking the law

d)     Do nothing

The following 4 graphs show the overall results of how people voted. A majority of the people voted the same way ideologically throughout the poll. Those who voted A, have more conservative views regarding the topic of immigration. Those who voted B have more liberal views. Finally, those who voted C or D have more moderate views. (or they genuinely had no idea what we were talking about). Overall, each question had divisive results because the data is mainly split between 2 answer choices, A and B.

This graph shows that the majority of students are either for or against change the 14th Amendment with a small percentage not knowing.

This graph shows that more people believe immigration is a top issue as opposed to not.

This graph shows in increased number of students who favor SB1070. More people either didn't care of opposed the new law.

This shows that exactly half of those who were questioned believe that illegal immigrants should be deported.

***Notice, more people oppose changing the 14th Amendment but favor SB1070 and think that illegals should be deported.

-Freshman- A majority of them believed that the 14th Amendment should be changed.

-Sophomores-Relatively the same opinions regarding each answer choice. There is no significant difference.

-Juniors-Voted B more often than A or not knowing.

-Seniors were almost equal in the number of people who said A or B. They were also more likely to have an actually opinion on the matter than the other grade levels rather than not knowing or not caring.

A larger number of students believe that that 14th Amendment should be changed.

This graph shows that each grade level, with the exclusive of freshman, feel as though immigration is among the top issues to be focused on. Seniors had the largest gap between yes and no.

This graph shows that a majority of students favor the new immigration law, SB1070. Each grade level had more students favor it than oppose it.

This graph shows that freshman and sophomores are more likely to choose to grant illegals citizenship; however, as you view the data as it progresses by age, older students believe that illegals should be deported. This may have occurred because older students have a better understanding of US History and Economics and know to more of an extent what the effects of illegal immigration is.

This graph shows the varying views of honors students versus regular education students. Honors students were more likely to vote for the 14th Amendment to remain the same than regular students. Honors students were also more like to have a definite opinion then regular students.

This graph doesn't have a significant cleavage. Honors students and regular students had almost the same opinion for each answer choice.  

 This graph shows that more honors students were more likely to favor SB1070 than regular. Those that opposed were equal though.

 This graph shows that more honors students voted for A and B. It is possible that honors students, for the most part, have a better understanding of the effects of illegal immigration on the economy as well as jobs than regular students.

 

Error in Our Questions

Question one had some error because we had a short phrase the voter must read before answering and it turned out many voters either skipped reading it and just put, “I don’t know” or still didn’t seem to understand what the 14^th amendment was after reading. We should have asked a question where the public had a little more background information on the subject.

Possibly our largest error was in question number three. We believe everyone had the public knowledge of the Senate Bill 1070 but we were wrong. Many people when asked didn’t know what the bill was and we had to explain it to them which led to even further error created by our personal individual explanations. We should have chosen either a better question or a better way of describing what the bill was to the public.

Some of our demographics questions were in error as well. We asked questions about whether or not the voter was in clubs or was an athlete but found that these questions either had not enough variety of voters or were just not relevant to the topic we were discussing; making them rather useless questions.

Error In Sampling

One error we made in our sampling is that we only asked students from 5^th hour lunch. Due to having class 4^th hour, our group simply could not ask the students in 4^th hour lunch. This was problematic because it most likely led to a somewhat biased or not random poll. Many seniors leave 4^th period which made them nearly impossible to poll and all the students who have 4^th hour lunch were not questioned as well, so we unfortunately were unable to get as accurate of a poll as we would have liked.

Also some personal error in our group was our individual personalities. Some of us were more outgoing than others making polling simple while some of us being shyer made polling more difficult and at times more biased.

Method of Randomness

We achieved randomness by asking students during 5th lunch, between passing periods and before school. This allowed us to be able to poll people of all grade levels because our questioning occurred during different times of the day. We also tried not to poll groups of people, individuals were preferred. By polling groups of people our demographics wouldn’t have been as diverse as they were. Also, we tried to avoid people that we knew to prevent results that could possible be biased. Finally, we kept our personal opinions to ourselves, as we didn’t want to sway the voter in a particular way. All of these helped us to acquire the most random and accurate sample that we could.