Poll Shows Most in U.S. Want Overhaul of Immigration Laws

The number of Americans who describe illegal immigration as a serious problem has grown, and a slim majority supports Arizona’s stringent new law, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.

http://nyti.ms/a4ngph

U.S. Public Willing to Accept Some Civil Rights Violations in Immigration Crackdown

A fatally wounded man left dying on a New York sidewalk was ignored for nearly two hours. Would you have stopped to help?

New York has been shaken by the murder of a 31-year-old Guatemalan immigrant, Hugo Tale-Yax, who was stabbed to death on a Queens street last week. What has really shocked people is not so much the fact of a homicidal assault, or even that Tale-Yax appears to have been killed while trying to come to the aid of a woman who was herself being attacked, but that more than 20 passersby walked past the dying man and nearly two hours passed before anyone did anything and the emergency services arrived.

Recently, Balaji Ravichandran raised similar issues about the phenomenon of urban-dwellers’ apparent immunity from a moral imperative to intervene, when he related his experience of being racially abused while bystanders pretended it wasn’t happening. In that case, though, at least bystanders had the rational excuse of self-preservation and reluctance to place themselves in harm’s way. In Tale-Yax’s case, a “good Samaritan” who had himself intervened to help another was ignored and stepped around by passersby, as he lay dying.

Do you know how you’d behave in such circumstances? Do you have any experience to share? Are you confident that you would stop to help, or do you fear you’d be another who would walk on by?

And should we be worried in a larger sense about the state of a society where this can happen?

Would you be a good Samaritan? | Open thread

Growing Split in Arizona Over Immigration

Immigration has always polarized the state. But the new law has widened the chasm in a way few can remember.

http://nyti.ms/9oFVxu

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR: Ending the Slavery Blame-Game

The debate over slavery reparations ignores Africans’ role in selling human beings.

http://nyti.ms/cwZq1A

Yet everywhere, anxious Democrats wring their hands. They’ve seen this Lucy-and-the-football routine before, and they’re just waiting for their ball to be snatched away, the foiled Charlie Browns again. Remember how the exit polls in 2004 predicted President Kerry?

The anxiety is more acute this year, because Senator Obama is the first African-American major-party presidential nominee. And even pollsters say they can’t be sure how accurately polls capture people’s feelings about race, or how forthcoming Americans are in talking about a black candidate.

In recent days, nervous Obama supporters have traded worry about a survey — widely disputed by pollsters yet voraciously consumed by the politically obsessed — that concluded racial bias would cost Mr. Obama six percentage points in the final outcome. He is, of course, about six points ahead in current polls. See? He’s going to lose.

If he does, it wouldn’t be the first time that polls have overstated support for an African-American candidate. Since 1982, people have talked about the Bradley effect, where even last-minute polls predict a wide margin of victory, yet the black candidate goes on to lose, or win in a squeaker. (In the case that lent the phenomenon its name, Tom Bradley, the mayor of Los Angeles, lost his race for governor, the assumption being that voters lied to pollsters about their support for an African-American.)

But pollsters and political scientists say concern about a Bradley effect — some call it a Wilder effect or a Dinkins effect, and plenty call it a theory in search of data — is misplaced. It obscures what they argue is the more important point: there are plenty of ways that race complicates polling. Considered alone or in combination, these factors could produce an unforeseen Obama landslide with surprise victories in the South, a stunningly large Obama loss, or a recount-thin margin. In a year that has already turned expectations upside down, it is hard to completely reassure the fretters.

Among the non-Bradley factors at the intersection of race and polling is something called the reverse Bradley (perhaps more prevalent than the Bradley), in which polls understate support for a black candidate, particularly in regions where it is socially acceptable to express distrust of blacks. Then there are the voters not captured by polls. Research shows that those who refuse to participate in surveys tend to be less likely to vote for a black candidate. The race of the questioner, too, affects a poll — but no one is sure whether people give more or less accurate answers when they’re interviewed by someone of their own race.

“How much we are under-representing people who are intolerant and therefore unlikely to vote for Obama is an open question,” said Andrew Kohut, the president of Pew Research Center. “I suspect not a great deal, but maybe some. And ‘maybe some’ could be crucial in a tight election.”

In 1982, exit polls had Mayor Bradley so likely to win that newspaper headlines called him the victor. Yet he lost, narrowly. There emerged what seemed like a pattern: a number of polls found more support than there actually was for Harold Washington in the 1983 Chicago mayoral race; for David N. Dinkins in the 1989 New York mayoral race; and for L. Douglas Wilder in the 1989 Virginia governor’s race.

Were people so afraid to appear bigoted that they lied to pollsters, thinking it more socially acceptable to support a black candidate? Pollsters and political scientists have long questioned that assumption because they do not believe people have an incentive to deceive unless they are explicitly asked, “Do you support the white guy or the black guy?”

“We have no evidence that people lie to us,” said Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Media Research, which conducts the exit polls the television networks use. He and others say that discrepancy in the polls has more to do with which people decline to participate, or say they are undecided.

Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at M.I.T. who has written about the “I don’t know” voters, points out that while polls overpredicted Mr. Dinkins’s support in 1989, they got it right in 1993, when he was running against the same opponent, Rudolph Giuliani. In 1989, Mr. Berinsky argues, people who feared being thought racist said “I don’t know.” By 1993, they could find things in Mr. Dinkins’s mayoral record to object to and so felt more free to express their opposition without fear of seeming racist.

Mr. Kohut conducted a study in 1997 looking at differences between people who readily agreed to be polled and those who agreed only after one or more callbacks. Reluctant participants were significantly more likely to have negative attitudes toward blacks — 15 percent said they had a “very favorable” attitude toward them, as opposed to 24 percent of the ready respondents. “The kinds of people suspicious of surveys are also more intolerant,” Mr. Kohut said.

Scott Keeter, Pew’s director of survey research, said pollsters had a harder time reaching voters with lower levels of education. Less-educated whites are the kind Mr. Obama has had trouble winning over. Conversely, young people are more likely to answer surveys, and they tend to favor Mr. Obama.

There may be several factors at work: Michael Traugott, a University of Michigan professor who studies polling, argues that the Bradley effect was misnamed from the start; the problem with the polls in the 1982 race was not that they failed to capture latent racism but that they failed to account for the absentee ballots, which ultimately handed the election to the white Republican, George Deukmejian.

Whatever its causes, the Bradley gap seems to be disappearing.

In a new study, Daniel J. Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, considered 133 elections between 1989 and 2006 and found that blacks running for office before 1996 suffered a median Bradley effect of 3 percentage points. Blacks running after 1996, however, performed about 3 percentage points better than their polls predicted. Mr. Hopkins argues that the changes in the welfare laws in 1996 and the decline of violent crime took off the table issues that had aggravated racial animosity.

The Bradley effect in the 2006 vote was largely absent (and in some stances a reverse effect was seen by some pollsters). In Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr., a black congressman, lost by six points. His pollster, Pete Brodnitz, said the campaign had been watching for a Bradley effect and screened carefully to make sure its own polls looked only at the people most likely to vote. Internal polls were largely correct, but some public polls, relying on a more general population, were wildly off. Mr. Brodnitz blamed bad polling, not lying.

In this year’s Democratic primaries, University of Washington researchers found a Bradley effect in three states, but a reverse Bradley effect in 12 (in the other 17, polls were within a seven-point margin of error).

The results tended to correlate with the black population in a state: blacks made up 15 percent or more of the population in almost all the states where the polls showed less support for Mr. Obama than there actually was; in the three states where polls showed more support than there was, less than 10 percent of the population is black.

The differences are too great to be explained by just high black turnout, said Anthony Greenwald, one of the researchers. Nor were people necessarily lying. Instead, he sees a cultural dynamic at work: the states where polls underpredicted support for Mr. Obama were generally in the Southeast, where the culture has more stubbornly favored whites, so the “right” answer there was to choose the white candidate. In the three states where polls in the study overpredicted support for Mr. Obama — Rhode Island, California and New Hampshire — “the desirable thing is to appear unbiased and unprejudiced,” Mr. Greenwald said. (Many polling experts also believe that Mr. Obama was benefiting from an Iowa bounce in the late New Hampshire polls, as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had been ahead for months, and that therefore Mr. Obama’s loss there was not a true Bradley effect.)

Read rest here…

“A new study by a professor at the University of Texas at Austin suggests that home plate umpires call balls and strikes more favorably when the pitcher is their same race, Time magazine reported.

The research team led Daniel Hamermesh, professor of economics, found that umpires call strikes more for pitchers of their race and balls more when the pitcher is of another race, Time said.

The study found that the disparity occurred in 1 percent of pitches. The researchers analyzed 2.1 million umpire calls between the 2004 and 2006 seasons, Time said.

“One pitch called the other way affects things a lot,” Hamermesh said. “Baseball is a very closely played game.”

Hamermesh added that even a slight bias by umpires will affect the kinds of pitches that pitchers make if they believe they are getting squeezed by the umps. Pitchers who are getting balls called too much might start throwing over the middle of the plate more, thus resulting in batters getting fat pitches to hit, Time said.

Seventy-one percent of major-league pitchers and 87 percent of umpires are white. ” more…

What happened on stage at the Laugh Factory shocked America. However, American public had been getting a taste of all this throughout the year. The opening salvo was fired by Mel Gibson with his movie that suspiciously reeked of anti-Semitic motives according to some. If there were any doubts about his ulterior motives they were summarily confirmed when he got arrested and went on an allegedly anti-Semitic tirade with a police officer.

But these were people affected by alcohol or anger with “impaired judgment”. How about politicians who are known not to open up readily and are known to choose their words carefully. One would think that the days of Dixieland are gone with Strom Thurmond. Remember Trent Lot who got a little too comfy at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party. His apology was not enough and he had to resign as the majority whip. Similarly, the infamous macaca incident involving George Allen was enough to sink his political ship.

However, the Kramer incident has many people asking the question: Where did all that come from? For some especially from the African American community, the answer is simple. It was there all along. For others it is more of an anomaly, a failure of a single person and not the whole system. A recent article in TIME named “The Kramer in All of Us” asks some difficult questions. It points out the all-too-familiar “offense-contrition-comeback cycle” that is becoming a hallmark of incidents like these. Another article raises a very interesting point. According to Tabitha Dell Angelo, Michael Richards actions are being judged by consequences and not intent.

According to her:

“As I am writing, it is becoming clear what he really looks like. His expression reminds me of a small child who was caught doing something wrong. Just as young children judge “wrongness” by the consequences and not the intent of the actions, Richards is responding to the consequences more than the intent. We must remember though that this is a very immature expression of morality. As we get older, have more experiences, dare I say, “grow up”, we learn to reason in a morally advanced way. Richards has not learned to do this yet.”

I agree with this observation. This observation is important because of two reasons: first, this attitude of averting difficult racial issues prevents us from addressing them and second if we do talk about these issues we are more focused on risk management strategies rather than real remedies. We still have not been able to decide whether institutional racism is a true phenomenon or a figment of our imaginations and biases.

As a physician and as a student of public health I am always interested in learning about the impact of racial attitudes on health disparities. On a bigger scale and more relevant to our discussion is the question: do these attitudes have any bearing on institutions like health care and justice? If (some) actors and politicians harbor these ideas then are there (some) medical health professionals, researchers and administrators that do the same? Does it impact health disparities in any meaningful way?

For a society that is led to believe through news, media and ads that race in America is a rapidly healing wound these occasional abrasions remind us of a slightly different reality.

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