The ignominious reversal nine days ago of the Senate's cave-in on illegal immigration doesn't mean the danger is over. The Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista coalition remains in control of the corporate media and is thus well-situated to try to use the illegal alien demonstrators in the streets to intimidate America.

For example, the Rupert Murdoch-subsidized Weekly Standard continues to pound the drums for the neocon Grand Strategy of Invade-the-World-Invite-the-World. Editor Bill Kristol displayed his contempt for patriotic conservatives alarmed by illegal immigration in his notoriously febrile April 10th editorial "Y for Yahoo." Kristol's disdain for the average American, whose sons are doing most of the fighting and dying in Kristol's war in Iraq, is manifest, as Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus pointed out in "S for Snob."

Two weeks later in the Weekly Standard, bootlicking Bush acolyte Fred Barnes, author of the unintentionally comic paean to the President, Rebel-in-Chief, announced in "Bordering on a Victory" that "The immigration issue has flipped in President Bush's favor." Barnes claimed portentously:

"The upshot is that an immigration bill appears likely (but not certain) to pass when Congress returns from its Easter recess on April 24—and probably in a "comprehensive" form congenial to Bush and Republican congressional leaders."

As evidence, Barnes quotes:

"Once the [Senate Judiciary] committee acted, 'the polls, indeed the whole atmosphere, changed to the pro-immigrant side," says Jeffrey Bell, a Republican consultant working for La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights group."

Note whom Barnes' trusted source Bell is working for: La Raza! In English, of course, "La Raza" means "The Race", a term promoted by the Mexican government to assert the claim that mestizos are the racially superior ideal mixture of the best of the Indian and white races.

So what about the new polls supposedly supporting the cave-in?

For decades, voter surveys have consistently shown that the public is outraged by the extent of illegal immigration. For example, in a CBS News poll last October, 75 percent said the government was "not doing enough" to keep out illegal aliens, while 15 percent were satisfied and merely 4 percent thought efforts were too restrictive.

Obviously, this is not a satisfactory result from the point of view of the Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista coalition.  Fortunately for them, when it comes to specific mechanisms for enforcing this broad consensus, there is ample room to confuse and mislead the public by torturing the poll questions.

I spent over a decade and a half in the marketing research industry, and I've learned how hard it is to conduct a survey that elicits honest answers on any topic, much less one where the media routinely denigrates one side as "yahoos". For example, merely having employees with accents conduct the questioning is likely to bias the answers severely, since most Americans are quite polite.

The plain fact is, however, that in the privacy of the voting booth, 56 percent of Arizonans voted for Proposition 200 to crack down on illegal immigration in 2004, just as 59 percent of Californians voted for Proposition 187 in 1994.

The liberal Los Angeles Times has gotten a lot of publicity lately for its April 13th poll, which strikes me as a classic example of writing questions to get the responses you wanted. In the marketing research business, you'd lose clients by doing work so shoddy, but this poll suits the Times' agenda. [Most Back Tighter Border and a Guest-Worker Plan by Ronald Brownstein, Times Staff Writer April 13, 2006]

Let's look in detail at the three proposals offered:

Create a guest-worker program that would give a temporary visa to noncitizens who want to legally work in the U.S.

Support: 54%

Oppose: 21%

Don't know: 25%

There are several obvious problems with this question.

• The word "legally" serves no logical purpose in the question. Instead, its role is to distract opponents of illegal immigration, to convey the message: "These aren't illegal aliens we're talking about! These are people who want to work legally. Legally."

• The word "noncitizens" is intentionally vague. Exactly who are these people who would get the temporary visas? Legally resident noncitizens already in America? Illegal aliens? Foreigners living in their own countries? There's no way to tell. You are invited to agree with whatever policy you believe is being advocated here.

• Most hopelessly confusing of all, however, is that this statement could well be interpreted, quite rationally, as calling for mass deportations. This proposal is for a "temporary visa" for a "guest-worker" who will be here "legally". The essential attribute of a "guest" is that eventually he leaves. This emphasis on the limited duration of the guest-worker's stay in America logically implies a mechanism for making him leave when his temporary visa expires—in other words, deportation. Delayed deportation, but deportation nonetheless … which would be much stricter than the current system of Ollie Ollie Home Free once the illegal immigrant penetrate a few dozen miles north of the border.

Without a system of deportation, this whole proposal is fraudulent.

Now, you know and I know, and the people proposing a guest worker program know, that fraudulent is exactly what this is intended to be. A guest-worker program would be another old shell game scam, just like the 1986 amnesty-employer sanction "compromise", which turned out to be amnesty-only when enforcement was gutted by corrupt Congressional pressure on the INS to go easy on campaign contributors who were employing large numbers of illegal aliens

But millions of Americans are unaware of this shameful past and disgraceful present. After all, who's going to tell them? The LA Times?

Next question:

Allow undocumented immigrants who have been living and working in the U.S. for a number of years, with no criminal record, to start a path to citizenship."

Support: 66%

Oppose: 18%

Don't know: 16%

• You'll note that the word "amnesty" is nowhere mentioned. For over two years now, President Bush has been trying to redefine "amnesty" to mean the only thing about the whole cave-in that he claims he's against: starting illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship. So, this is "amnesty" even by Bush's absurdly narrow definition. But, for some reason, the LA Times forgot to include the word "amnesty" in the proposal.

• One notorious problem with survey research is that a sizable fraction of respondents try to be nice to pollsters and tell them what they want to hear. Some of the politically savvier participants in the poll will realize that the pollster's use of the euphemism "undocumented" for "illegal" is a dead-certain giveaway that they are supposed to answer "Support".

• But lots of other respondents aren't terribly familiar with the term "undocumented". They don't realize it means "illegal". They reason: "If the question was about illegal immigrants, well, then it would ask about 'illegal immigrants.' And if they were illegal immigrants, they'd, by definition, have a criminal record, right? So, these are innocent people who, apparently, have misplaced some documents. And we don't want to waste time harassing them. It's the illegal immigrants we've got to concentrate on doing something about!"

• Exactly where do the "undocumented" get to "start a path to citizenship"? Here? Or back home in their native countries? It doesn't say.

You know and I know etc. that "start a path to citizenship" is a euphemism for "immediately get the privilege of living in America forever, and get to start bringing in their relatives, and if they feel like it, they eventually get to vote too." But that's not what it says.

• The phrase "start a path to citizenship" has been carefully crafted to mislead, to make it sound like the illegals are embarking on some arduous journey of the soul that will mold them into true-blue Americans. And who could be against that? The reality, of course, is quite different.

Next question:

"Fence off hundreds of miles of the border between the U.S. and Mexico and make it a felony to enter illegally."

Support: 42%

Oppose: 35%

Don't know: 23%

This is the only proposal that's not weasel-worded into meaningless ambiguousness. It contains none of the euphemisms of the two policies that the LA Times favors. It's been phrased to shock—as the Open Borders/Cheap Labor/Reconquista Lobby expected—the sensitivities of the public.

But still it passed! America wants a fence!

And America does not want an amnesty—as the GOP will find out the hard way if it lets lobbyists and ideologues bamboozle it over the amnesty cliff.

[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]