National poll on Arizona immigration law echoes Utah's results

WASHINGTON — Utahns appear to be in line with a strong majority of Americans who support Arizona's controversial new immigration law and would back similar laws in their own states, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll found.

Sixty-one percent of Americans — and 64 percent of registered voters — said they favored the law in a survey of 1,016 adults conducted May 6-9.

Strikingly, nearly half of Democrats like the law, under which local law enforcement officers are tasked with verifying people's immigration status if they suspect them of being in the country illegally. While the Democratic Party generally is regarded as more sympathetic to illegal immigrants' plights, 46 percent of Democrats said they favored the law for Arizona and 49 percent said they'd favor the law's passage in their own states.

A Dan Jones & Associates poll for the Deseret News and KSL-TV last month found 65 percent of 406 registered Utah voters were in favor of following Arizona's lead with a local version of the law. Rep. Stephen Sandstrom, R-Orem, said he intends to run a bill in the 2011 Utah legislative session modeled on the Arizona statute. In Utah, 76 percent of Republicans support the law, compared to 34 percent of Democrats, according to Jones.

More than eight in 10 Republicans and 54 percent of independents favor the law, the McClatchy-Ipsos survey showed.

In addition, about 69 percent of Americans said they wouldn't mind if police officers stopped them to ask for proof of their citizenship or legal rights to be in the country; about 29 percent would mind, considering it a violation of their rights; and about 3 percent were unsure.

A separate Pew Research Center poll on the Arizona law released Wednesday found similar sentiments.

In the McClatchy-Ipsos poll, almost two-thirds of Americans said illegal immigration was a real problem that hurt the country; they were evenly split as to whether the jobs illegal immigrants take are ones that Americans don't want.

The McClatchy-Ipsos poll had an error margin of plus or minus 3.07 percentage points for all those surveyed and 3.26 percentage points for registered voters.

These results speak to the political land mines that immigration policy presents for President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. Obama has called the Arizona law misguided. The Justice Department is considering a lawsuit to block it, concerned about the implications for civil rights and for police, who might be diverted from basic public safety tasks or find it harder to talk to potential witnesses in criminal investigations.