What People Know ... About Immigration

A new Pew poll has some knowledge questions about he immigration bill and, as you'd expect, we don't do so good.  See below (bold face is the correct answer):

You can write this a couple of ways.  You can say, as Pew notes, that nearly half don't know who introduced the bill (the 47 percent on the first question) but nearly half do know applicants can remain in the U.S. (46 percent).  Or you can combine the questions and be really depressing, as Pew noted:

Just 24% of the public correctly answered both knowledge questions, 35% got one question correct while 41% answered neither question correctly.

In other words, fewer than a quarter of U.S. adults got both right, and 2-out-of-5 couldn't manage to answer either one correctly.

The fine folks at Pew do something neat in their next section, they look at attitudes of the "knowledgeable."  See below:

This is telling.  The more knowledgeable also are more supportive, the less knowledgeable are less so (and more likely to say, quite honestly I think, that they have no opinion).