By a more than two-to-one margin, American voters favor the 2010 Arizona immigration law.
A Fox News poll released Friday shows 65 percent of voters favor the controversial law, while 31 percent oppose it.
Eighty-four percent of Republicans favor Arizona’s law, while 46 percent of Democrats do. A 51-percent majority of Democrats opposes the law.
Click here for the full poll results.
Independents favor the law by a 40 percentage-point margin (67-27 percent). That’s good news for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who has said he thinks Arizona’s law would be a good model for the rest of the country.
The Arizona law took effect in July 2010. It makes illegal immigration a state crime and allows local law enforcement to question the legal status of anyone stopped on suspicion of a crime and detain anyone who cannot prove his or her immigration status.
The Justice Department filed suit challenging it, and the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments next Wednesday on whether many of the law’s key provisions are constitutional.
Voters who live in the West (72 percent) and the Midwest (69 percent) are more likely than those living in other regions (61 percent) to approve of the Arizona law.
The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 910 randomly-chosen registered voters nationwide and is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from April 9-11. For the total sample, it has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
