Our May survey found that 75% believe immigration policy needs at least major changes, with 35% saying it needs to be “completely rebuilt.” Yet the broad public agreement that immigration policy should be revamped is not matched by consensus on how to deal with illegal and legal immigration.

While a solid majority of Americans say there should be a way for people in the U.S. illegally to remain, the public is more divided on the issue of citizenship.

Our May survey finds that 73% of Americans say there should be a way for people in the United States illegally to remain in this country if they meet certain requirements. Among those holding this view, 44% say illegal immigrants should be allowed to apply for citizenship, but 25% of the public says they should only be allowed to apply for legal residency. A quarter say they should not be allowed to stay legally.

Although many Americans believe the immigration systems needs at least major changes, surveys earlier this year suggested the public was not putting a priority for quick action.

The Democratic Party and many constituent groups have long pushed for changes and voiced unhappiness with President Obama’s lack of action on the issue during his first term.  But our February survey showed only a bare majority (51%) of the public believes it is essential to enact major immigration legislation this year.

In our annual policy priorities survey, released Jan. 24, 39% said that dealing with the issue of illegal immigration should be a top priority for the president and Congress. That placed it 17th on a list of policy priorities for the coming year.

There was a modest rise in the percentage of Americans who say equal priority should be given to both enhancing border security and a path to citizenship, according to our February survey.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say that better border security and stronger enforcement of immigration laws should be the bigger priority, while Democrats are more likely to want the focus to be on creating a way for illegal immigrants already here to become citizens if they meet certain requirements.

Overall attitudes about immigrants in the U.S. have become more positive than negative, despite the nation’s struggling economy.

Currently, 49% agree with the statement “immigrants today strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents,” according to our March survey. Somewhat fewer (41%) agree with an opposing statement: “immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing and health care.” Our survey in May found no consensus on whether the level of legal immigration should be increased or decreased – 36% said they should be decreased, 25% favored increasing them and 31% wanted to keep immigration at present levels.

The total immigrant population has continued to grow, while unauthorized immigration has declined slightly from its 2007 peak.

Our January report found the total U.S. immigrant population grew to a record 40.4 million in 2011, but unauthorized immigration actually fell slightly to 11.1 million in 2011, from a peak of 12 million in 2007.

The 11.1 million estimate for the number of unauthorized immigrants was developed by Pew Research Center senior demographer Jeffrey Passell. He describes the methodology behind the estimates in this interview.

A majority of Mexican immigrants who are in the U.S. legally and are eligible to become citizens have not taken that path for a variety of reasons.

We have also examined the issue of naturalization. Nearly two-thirds of the 5.4 million legal immigrants from Mexico who are eligible to become citizens of the United States have not yet taken that step. Their rate of naturalization—36%—is only half that of legal immigrants from all other countries combined, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data.

Net migration to the United States from Mexico has fallen to zero, and may have reversed.

Our spring 2012 report found that the largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million immigrants from Mexico, most of whom arrived illegally, the net migration flow has stopped and may have even reversed.

A majority of Mexicans say they would not move to the U.S. even if they had the means and opportunity to do so.

While a survey conducted in March found that 61% of Mexicans would not move to the U.S. even if they could do so, a sizable minority (35%) said they would move to the U.S. if they could, including 20% who say they would emigrate without authorization. The survey also found that Mexicans are less likely than they were a year ago to say that people from their country who move to the U.S. have a better life there.

See more of Pew Research Hispanic Center’s reports in our link bundle.

Read more Pew Research reports on Immigration.

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Eurostat, the European statistical agency, announced today that the European Union’s annual inflation rate in April was 1.4%, down from a rate of 2.7% in April 2012. Nonetheless, across eight EU nations surveyed by the Pew Research Center in March 2013, a median of 67% said rising prices were a “very” big problem in their countries. As the European Central Bank contemplates interest rate cuts to stimulate economic growth in a euro area now in recession, such public worry about inflation only complicates their task.

As the International Monetary Fund noted in its Spring 2013 World Economic Outlook, inflation is the dog that hasn’t barked in the wake of the Great Recession. Despite unprecedented monetary easing through various conventional and unconventional measures by both the European Central Bank and the Bank of England, prices in the European Union generally have been falling. In April, according to today’s Eurostat report, prices in Germany were rising by 1.1%, by 0.8% in France and by 1.5% in Spain.

Nevertheless, majorities in six of the eight countries see rising prices as a very big problem. The Greeks were the most worried: 94% say inflation is a major issue. But official statistics show that in March, when the survey was taken, Greek prices were actually falling at an annual rate of 0.2%; in April, according to Eurostat, consumer prices fell at a 0.6% annual rate.

Despite a national narrative widely propounded by German elites and government officials that the German psyche has been permanently scarred by the hyperinflation of the 1920s, rendering modern Germans inflation-phobic, only 31% of Germans think rising prices are a very big problem.

This relative lack of worry about inflation among Germans may be a sign that the European Central Bank, which has long been sensitive to German inflation concerns, has more room to maneuver than might otherwise have been thought, at least with the German public.

Bruce Stokes is director of global economic attitudes in the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project.

As Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with President Obama today, his calls for more Western aid to Syrian rebels put him at odds with Turkish public opinion.

A Pew Research survey conducted earlier this spring found that 68% of Turks opposed Western countries sending weapons and other supplies to anti-government rebels in Syria — the second-highest level of opposition among the six predominantly Muslim countries surveyed in the region.

Similarly high majorities in Turkey opposed aid to the rebels by Arab nations (66%) and their own country (65%).

Erdogan has pressured the Obama administration to provide military aid to the rebels seeking to oust Syrian president Bashar al-Assad; hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have poured into Turkey, and Erdogan’s government has blamed Assad’s regime for car bombings that killed 46 people last week in a Turkish border town.

In the Pew Research survey, which was conducted before those blasts, 62% of Turks said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the violence in Syria spreading to their country.

The Turks’ opposition to outside intervention in the Syrian conflict doesn’t, however, mean they support Assad. Of Turks surveyed, 72% said they had an unfavorable opinion of the Syrian leader (including 48% with a “very unfavorable” view); only 8% viewed Assad favorably.

Drew DeSilver is senior writer at the Pew Research Center.

Popularity is no protection against budget cuts: The parts of government that Americans like the most — state, cities and counties, and the U.S. Postal Service — are also the ones shedding workers the fastest.

The most recent nonfarm payroll figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the public sector continues to be a drag on overall employment. Governments at all levels have shed 835,300 jobs since public-sector employment peaked in April 2009 (not counting the spike in early 2010 caused by temporary Census workers). The private sector, meanwhile, has regained 6.78 million jobs since bottoming out in February 2010, and over the past year has averaged 180,500 new jobs a month.

But the government-sector job cuts haven’t been spread evenly. In terms of sheer numbers, local schools have lost the most: 336,300 jobs over the past four years. Other local government cutbacks have eliminated 217,600 jobs; states (except for public colleges and universities) are down 160,300 jobs.

In a Pew Research Center survey conducted in March, 63% of people said they had a favorable opinion of their local government, a level that’s stayed fairly constant over several years; 57% expressed favorable views of their state government, a five-point uptick from last year. But  just 28% rated the federal government favorably, versus 65% unfavorably; the favorability rating was five points lower than a year earlier and the lowest ever in a Pew Research Center survey.

Notwithstanding the dim view most people take of the federal government, and despite the wide-ranging budget cuts known as “sequestration,” most of the federal payroll remains intact. Leaving aside one big exception, there were 20,000 fewer federal employees last month than there were four years earlier, a decline of less than 1%.

The exception is the long-suffering Postal Service, where employment is down by 132,300 jobs, or 18.3%, since April 2009. The Postal Service has been shedding workers for years, though the pace picked up during the recession; it accounts for 15.8% of all government job cuts since April 2009, even though it employed only 3.2% of the total government workforce.

Even so, the Postal Service is one of the better-regarded arms of the federal government. In a 2010 Pew Research survey, 83% of people said they had a favorable opinion of the Postal Service, the highest level among the 13 agencies asked about. More recently, 60% of respondents in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said they had “very” (28%) or “somewhat” (32%) positive feelings toward the Postal Service — more than President Obama, either major party, the Catholic Church or the NRA.

The one government sector that’s actually added jobs has been state education, which is up 31,200 jobs (or 1.3%) since April 2009. Although many state legislatures have reduced funding for public colleges and universities over that time, tuition bills have risen sharply to compensate.

Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at the Pew Research Center.

The Census Bureau made big news last week when it reported that the black voter turnout rate (66.2%) exceeded the white voter turnout rate (64.1%) for the first time ever in 2012. But a closer look at the numbers raises some intriguing questions.

It’s possible that the lines may have first crossed in 2008. But it’s also possible they may not have crossed at all.

Let’s start with the second scenario. It’s based on data that suggest that last year, blacks may have been more inclined than whites to report that they voted when in fact they didn’t. This is known as a “social desirability bias,” a familiar concern among survey researchers.

The Census Bureau bases its estimates of voter turnout on self-reports from a survey of a nationally representative sample of about 55,000 households. The survey is conducted in the two weeks after each federal election and is considered the best source of information on the demographics of the nation’s electorate. However, this self-report method typically produces a modest over-estimate of turnout, and 2012 was no exception. According to the Census Bureau’s estimates, 133 million Americans voted last year, but according to the official state-by-state tallies, just 129 million did.

Moreover, if you analyze the discrepancies by state, as the Pew Research Center has (download our Election Turnout Rates by State data in Excel), you find a pattern that casts some doubt on the Census Bureau’s announcement. It turns out that the phenomenon of over reporting tended to be most pronounced in states that have the highest share of blacks in their citizen-age electorate.

As the chart below shows, Mississippi and Washington, D.C., were the two jurisdictions with the largest gap between the estimated and official total voter turnout rates. In Mississippi, the Census Bureau estimated a statewide turnout rate of 74.5%, while the actual state tallies showed a turnout rate of 60.4%—a gap of 14.1 percentage points. In Washington, the Census Bureau estimated a jurisdiction wide turnout rate of 75.9%, compared with an actual turnout rate of 63.7%—a gap of 12.2 percentage points. The Census Bureau’s estimates also place Mississippi and the District of Columbia ahead of any other state’s voter turnout rate in 2012, even the usual top dog Minnesota, whose officials raised questions about the Census Bureau’s results.

Mississippi and Washington also happen to be the two jurisdictions in the country with the highest share of blacks in their voting age citizen eligible population—35% and 49%,¹ respectively. As the scatter plot chart of voter turnout rates in all 50 states and the District of Columbia shows, respondents in other states with high black population shares—such as South Carolina, Louisiana and Georgia—also over-reported their turnout rates in 2012 at levels well above the nationwide gap of 1.8 percentage points.

Might this be because non-voting blacks were more eager than non-voting whites to tell survey takers that they voted for the first ever African-American president? While there’s no way of knowing for sure, the data are suggestive. When we plotted the state discrepancies in 2008 and 2004, we found a similar pattern, but we also found the racial skew was stronger in 2008 and 2012, the two elections in which Obama was on the ballot, than in 2004.

To better understand these patterns, we computed a “correlation coefficient,” which measures the relationship between two phenomena of interest—in this case, the over reporting of turnout in a state (the difference between the estimated and official voter turnout rates) and the share of a state’s adult population that is black. Our analysis finds a positive correlation of .52 (on a scale of -1 to 1) in 2012, .54 in 2008 and .41 in 2004. If we remove the two biggest outliers in the scatter plot analysis—Mississippi and Washington—the overall correlation remains positive, but it is only about half as large.

It’s also important to note that some states with small black populations over-reported, while a few states with large black populations under-reported. For example, the Census Bureau estimated that New Mexico’s voter turnout rate was 61.6%, compared with the official tally of 55%. New Mexico has a small share of blacks (2.7%) in its voting eligible population. On the other hand, the Census Bureau findings from Maryland, which has an age-eligible electorate that is 29% black, suggest that respondents under-reported their turnout by 2.5 percentage points.

Finally, it is also worth noting that just because voting was more widely over-reported in states with higher African-American populations, there is no way of knowing if blacks or non-blacks were more likely to over-report. This correlation is intriguing, but not definitive. In addition, one should keep in mind that the Census Bureau’s findings from individual states are subject to margins of error that may account for some of the apparent discrepancies in estimated and actual turnout rates.

Bottom line: This analysis doesn’t prove the Census Bureau’s finding is wrong. Nor does it negate the long-term turnout trends, which show that black turnout has been rising since 1996. It may, however, merit an asterisk alongside the claim that blacks turned out at a higher rate than whites in 2012.

But wait, what about the first scenario—the possibility  that this milestone actually occurred in 2008, not 2012?

That assessment is based an analysis that removes from the pool of eligible voters all adults who have been disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions, something the Census Bureau does not (and cannot) do. According to the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group, nearly 6 million adults are ineligible to vote for that reason, a disproportionate share of who are black. If you recalculate turnout rates after removing those disenfranchised voters, then 68.5% of eligible blacks voted in 2008, compared with 67% of eligible whites, according to Bernard L. Fraga, a political scientist studying at Harvard. The Census Bureau, by contrast, had 66.1% of whites voting that year, compared with 64.7% of blacks.

So pick your data source and write your own history.

Paul Taylor is the executive vice president of the Pew Research Center. Mark Hugo Lopez is associate director of the Pew Research Hispanic Center.

This scatterplot shows the gap between the U.S. Census Bureau estimate of the voter turnout rate and the actual voter turnout rate in the 2012 election, against the percentage of eligible voters who are black in each state. The Census Bureau survey overestimates turnout in states above the horizontal line and states farther to the right have higher shares of black eligible voters.