Latinos disapprove by a margin of more than two-to-one of the way the Obama administration is handling deportations of unauthorized immigrants, according to a new national survey of Latino adults by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.
Senior research staff answers questions from readers relating to all the areas covered by our seven projects ranging from polling techniques and findings, to media, technology, religious, demographic and global attitudes trends.
In testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement, the Pew Hispanic Center’s Rakesh Kochhar explains why for the first time since the official end of the Great Recession in June 2009, native-born workers in the second half of 2010 joined foreign-born workers in experiencing the beginnings of a recovery in employment.
As of March 2010, 11.2 million unauthorized immigrants were living in the U.S., virtually unchanged from a year earlier and remaining well below the population’s peak of 12 million in 2007. The number of unauthorized immigrants in the nation’s workforce (8 million) also has not changed in the past year.
March 25, 2011 marks the 100-year anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a disaster widely credited with strengthening the still nascent labor union movement in the United States. Public approval of unions, which peaked in during the Depression era when many worker protections were put into law, has had its ups and downs but has hit new lows in recent years.
Hispanic voters are nearly three times more prevalent in states that gained congressional seats and Electoral College votes in the 2010 reapportionment than they are in states that lost seats.
There will almost certainly be far more nonvoters than voters this year. Nonvoters are younger, less educated and more financially stressed than likely voters. They are also significantly less Republican and more likely to approve of Obama’s job performance.