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Tara McCarthy:

Polls in the UK show that most British people in the UK support the idea of a Muslim ban ...

But express.co.uk says that

A revealing survey exposed 34 per cent of Brits would supports Theresa May shutting down the nations' borders to immigrants from countries with overt links to Islamist terror.

Is Tara McCarthy's claim true or false? Are there other polls that support her claim?

ff524
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Sakib Arifin
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    Different polls will find different levels of support for the same idea, depending on (1) who they poll and how they sample, (2) how they phrase the question, and (3) when they poll. But I haven't seen a poll that shows majority approval for Muslim ban in UK - highest number on any poll I've seen was [47%](https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/comment/what-do-europeans-think-about-muslim-immigration) (with 23% disagreeing and 30% neither agreeing nor disagreeing). – ff524 Apr 06 '17 at 07:27
  • @ff524 Yes, but is this poll trustworthy? The answerer should keep that in mind and explain that clearly. – Sakib Arifin Apr 06 '17 at 07:45
  • Bill Burr has a good comedy bit on how useless polls are nowadays. Any opinion poll I have seen is to push the pollsters opinion, not to actually find out what people think. – daniel Apr 06 '17 at 11:51
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    Voting to close because one individual making one claim, contradicted even by a far-right newspaper, does not constitute notability. – gerrit Apr 06 '17 at 13:03
  • @gerrit The person who made the claim is quite notable. – Sakib Arifin Apr 06 '17 at 13:07
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    @BBCisFakeNews Never heard of him/her, you might add a note on why he/she is notable. [The barrister](http://www.thomasmore.co.uk/members/tara_mccarthy)? Does not appears notable enough to be on Wikipedia. See also [this meta question](https://skeptics.meta.stackexchange.com/q/3935/5337). – gerrit Apr 06 '17 at 13:12
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    "is this poll trustworthy" The question as it stands is whether such polls exist, not whether they are trustworthy. The more interesting question is "Do most Britons support the idea of a Muslim ban?", in which case we would need to evaluate the polls trustworthiness, but that's not what the question asks. – Oddthinking Apr 06 '17 at 13:21
  • @Oddthinking "Do most Britons support the idea of a Muslim ban?" I was actually interested about that but her claim doesn't mean that. So, we can't. But if the poll is trash, the answerer should write a thing or two about that. – Sakib Arifin Apr 06 '17 at 13:24
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    Can I just interject here that a `"muslim ban"` is actually not the same as `"shutting down the nations' borders to immigrants from countries with overt links to Islamist terror"`. It would be possible to support one and not the other. – ReasonablySkeptical Apr 06 '17 at 13:24
  • @CPerkins I was referring to Trump's Muslim ban, – Sakib Arifin Apr 06 '17 at 14:46

1 Answers1

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According to Most Europeans want immigration ban from Muslim-majority countries, poll reveals and citing to What Do Europeans Think About Muslim Immigration?

10,195 European adults were asked whether they agreed, disagreed with:

All further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped

The results were:

Majorities in all but two of the ten states agreed, ranging from 71% in Poland, 65% in Austria, 53% in Germany and 51% in Italy to 47% in the United Kingdom and 41% in Spain. In no country did the percentage that disagreed surpass 32%

So, since 47% is less than half, I would say the answer is technically "no", but on the other hand only 23% disagreed.

DavePhD
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  • Where did the 23% in the last sentence come from? – DevSolar Apr 07 '17 at 07:41
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    @DevSolar In the graph of the second reference, if you hover cursor on the graph bars, the corresponding numbers will appear. – DavePhD Apr 07 '17 at 11:41
  • you wouldn't happen to have statistics on how many oppose immigrants in general? IE how many are opposed to *Muslims* immigrants, and how many would just oppose any group of migration regardless of which they were asked about? – dsollen Apr 10 '17 at 17:03
  • @dsollen here is a survey about that http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/24/what-americans-europeans-think-of-immigrants/ Apparently, Germany, UK, and US appreciate immigrants the most, and Poland, Italy and Greece find immigrants burdensome. – DavePhD Apr 10 '17 at 17:33