Since its inception, America has been considered a land of opportunity for people around the world. The fabric of our nation is woven by immigrant experiences. However, the current immigration system does not work and is not fair for Americans or immigrants. Most Americans agree that the system is broken and needs to be reformed.
The Opportunity Agenda, in collaboration with key national, regional, and local groups has worked since 2006 to expand communications that build positive support for immigration policies. A critical part of this work is the continuous study of public opinion that can inform a winning strategy for immigration reform. We conduct original opinion research, including focus groups and surveys, monitor public opinion, and provide meta-analyses of current polling.
Most recently, we commissioned two rounds of original public opinion research, designed to respond to advocates’ needs for messages, which not only persuade but also activate core audiences; African American, Latino, and Progressive White voters. These are all groups with various stakes in immigration reform. Together, they comprise an important voting block that often shares the values that pro-immigrant policies embrace. However, research and experience have indicated, that they are not activated constituencies on the immigration issue.
To explore these audiences’ opinions and identify strategies of winning and sustaining their support for positive immigration policies, The Opportunity Agenda commissioned Lake Research Partners to conduct and report on a series of focus groups in spring 2009. This research was critical to the crafting and testing of messages, and identifying what persuades and activates voters. however, it was necessary to employ survey mechanisms to better test out this and additional messaging in order to overly extrapolate it to the target population at large.
We commissioned Gfk Roper Public Affairs and Media to conduct an online survey of African American, Latino, and White Progressive likely voters to evaluate support and messaging on immigration reform, which are discussed in this report.
The results were encouraging. There is broad support across all groups for our shared messaging: “workable solutions that uphold our nation’s values and move us forward together.” Majorities of all three constituencies support comprehensive immigration reform from the outset. support for reform builds when reform is defined by specific policies and is largely sustained as voters are exposed to different messages. The pro-immigrant and pro-reform messages that were tested enjoy support from a majority of each demographic group with some messages being more popular than others. These messages have slight positive or no net affect on already elevated levels of support for reform. Finally, pro-immigrant messages prevailed against opposition arguments in head-to-head testing.
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