"Americans Talk About Illegal Immigration" part 2

There was a lot of information about the final report that I discussed yesterday that I wanted to cover, and felt that it would be much easier to cover it in 2 or 3 different blogs than have one HUGE blog covering it all. In the "Introduction and Method Overview" section, it gives all the different aspects of the poll when it was done, including sample (1,012 American adults, 18+ living in continental U.S.), interview dates, method and timing (March 7-9 2003, each interview lasting ~7 minutes), sampling error, weighting, and explanations for any percentage not totaling 100%. The final report then begins to explain the polls findings dealing with General Attitudes Towards Immigration. It starts this section by explaining that immigration is the main "driving force behind population growth in the U.S.. One interesting find that I came across in this section was the question of how many immigrants should be able to enter the country annually and the majority of interviewees agreed that less than 300,000 should be allowed entry into the states annually. Within this section, it also asks about illegal immigration and goals that need to be set. The report explains that around 400,000 immigrants enter this country illegally each year, and that the total number of illegal immigrants residing in the country is around 8-10 million (it would be fairly impossible to get an exact number, due to obvious reasons). It goes on to state that 85% of Americans feel that illegal immigration is a "serious" problem, and 55% say that it is a "very serious" problem. Here, it also says that the elderly (65+ year-olds) are the most likely to state that illegal immigration is a "very serious" problem. For the goals that Americans want accomplished, 68% feel that there should be a COMPLETE halt in illegal immigration and 67% agree with efforts to push the number of residing illegal immigrants to zero. Seeing as this blog is already so long, I will cover the rest in a new blog.