Immigrant support
by April 27, 2010 7:07 am 48 views
A recent survey conducted by Zogby International for TechNet found that 66% of likely U.S. voters believe it’s acceptable to bring in highly-skilled individuals from other nations through the nation’s legal immigration process if an American is not available to fill jobs that require high-level engineering or science skills. One-fifth of likely voters (20%) believe that the job should be left open indefinitely.
Zogby surveyed 4,143 likely U.S. voters from March 12-15 with a margin of error of +/- 1.6 percentage points.
"One of the hallmarks of America has been of welcoming the best and brightest to our shores to create a better life," said Rey Ramsey, President and CEO of TechNet. "Some of the greatest technological innovations the world has ever seen were created by people who came to this country through the legal immigration process. Companies like Google, Intel, eBay, Yahoo! and many others were founded by immigrants.”
According to Duke University researchers, immigrants working in the United States have started 52% of Silicon Valley’s technology companies, one-fourth of all U.S. technology companies and contributed more than 25% of our global patents. High-skilled immigrants also make up 24% of the U.S. science and engineering workforce holding bachelor’s degrees and 47% of science and engineering workers who have Ph.D.s.
SURVEY FINDINGS
• Party affiliation: Political identifiers all agree on support for hiring high-skilled workers as Democrats support at 69.2%, Republicans at 65.1% and Independents at 64.4%.
• Age: Young people are slightly more accepting of hiring foreign workers as those 18-29 support (74.6%) while those aged 50-64 (61.2%) and 65+ (62.6%) support at lower levels.
• Gender: Men are slightly more accepting of hiring foreign workers (73.8%) than women (60.6%).
• Race: Slightly divergent views by race as whites support at 67.1% while Hispanics support at 71.1%, African Americans at 65.7% and Asians at 80.9%.
• Rural/Walmart shoppers: Those in rural areas support at 62.5% while those who identified themselves as weekly Walmart shoppers support at 65.6%.
• Unions/Non-union: Those in unions support at 65.1% while those not belonging to a union support at 66.9%.