Among the biggest downsides of the ongoing border crisis is that it is turning voters in the United States — the “nation of immigrants” — against immigration itself. The latest poll from Gallup, asking respondents whether they prefer immigration levels to rise, fall, or remain static surprised even me: A majority of those polled, 55 percent, want immigration restrictions, a 14-point increase over a year ago. One late and esteemed immigration expert warned 30 years ago that Americans would turn against lawful immigration when, as now, our country lost the ability to control illegal immigration, and now we are getting to experience that shift in real time.
That poll was conducted between June 3 and 23, with Gallup surveying 1,005 U.S. adults. The margin of error is +/- four points.
“Americans' Preferences for Immigration to the U.S.” Gallup asked those respondents: “Thinking now about immigrants — that is, people who come from other countries to live here in the United States. In your view, should immigration be kept at its present level, increased or decreased?”
In response, as noted, 55 percent of respondents wanted an immigration cut, compared to just 25 percent who wanted the level of immigration to be kept at its present level and 16 percent who wanted an increase.
By way of comparison, when Gallup asked that question last June, those favoring a decrease still led the way but then it was a plurality choice, not a majority one.
In that 2023 poll, 41 percent of those surveyed wanted a decrease in immigration, 26 percent preferred immigration levels to remain the same, and 26 percent of respondents were clamoring for even higher levels of immigration.
That is a 14-point swing in favor of immigration restrictions in just 12 months, coupled with a 10-point decline in those favoring more immigration. What changed?
Migrant Crisis, Mayorkas Impeachment, and the “Senate Border Bill”. Well before President Biden took office, I warned that the immigration policies he was then proposing would trigger a surge at the border if implemented. As I wrote on January 3, 2020:
These policies would, in tandem, serve as a magnet to hundreds of thousands if not millions of migrants seeking illegal entry to the United States, safe in the knowledge that if they were simply able to make it to the Southwest border, they could live and work in the United States indefinitely, regardless of the strength of their asylum claims, or even if they had any such claims at all. They would serve as a "Smuggler's Relief Act", and line the pockets of cartels that charge a "tax" for the transit of every migrant across "their" territory.
Which is exactly what happened. Despite that dire warning, however, neither illegal immigration nor the border played much of a role in the 2020 presidential election campaign. I was one of the few then who were even tracking those issues.
For what it’s worth, few were paying attention when Border Patrol agents set new monthly records for apprehensions at the Southwest border in May 2022, and again that December, or even when they clocked a new annual record in FY 2022, when agents nabbed more than 2.2 million illegal entrants.
How do I know few in the public were paying attention to the border then? Because in a December 2022 poll of 1,851 registered voters, Harvard/Harris asked respondents: “How many border crossing by illegal immigrants do you think are occurring each year?”
In response, 75 percent of those polled believed that illegal entries totaled somewhere between less than 100,000 and one million. The most common response — given by 21 percent of those surveyed — was that illegal border entries were somewhere between 100,000 and 250,000 annually — an answer off that year by about a factor of 10.
Not that I criticize, let alone blame, any of those respondents. The vast majority of legacy media ignored the border crisis, or worse derided those in Congress brought it up in hearing after hearing as DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dissembled and claimed that the border was a “challenge”, not a “crisis”.
Three factors, I believe, brought the disaster at the border to the public’s attention.
The first was a program under which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in April 2022, began busing illegal migrants released by DHS onto the streets of small border-adjacent communities like Uvalde (population: 16,000) and Carrizo Springs (population: 5,200), first to Washington, D.C., and then to other major cities like New York City, Chicago, and beyond.
The governor’s actions were dismissed as a “political stunt” (ask the people in Uvalde whether it was), but soon the impacts of the border began to be felt by the residents and the budgets of those wealthy cities, forcing major media outlets there to report on the issue.
The second factor was Mayorkas’ impeachment by the House Homeland Security Committee in February 2024, largely for his failures to secure the border. Again, that forced the media to report on the situation at the line, if only to again ridicule the actions of the House GOP as yet another “stunt”.
That impeachment posed such a serious threat to the president’s political future that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) was forced to neuter his chamber’s powerful constitutional impeachment authority to prevent a hearing in the Upper Chamber in which Mayorkas’ failings would be exposed.
The third factor, ironically, was the so-called “bipartisan Senate border bill”, negotiated last fall and winter by Sens. Jim Lankford (R-Okla.), Krysten Sinema (I-Ariz.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and introduced by the trio in February.
The White House and Democratic congressional leaders heralded that bill as a palliative that would provide the president with critical tools he “needed” to bring the border under control.
The problem was the bill was nothing of the sort. Instead, it would have codified the same failed administration policies that had already brought the border to the brink of collapse, while making it more difficult for any future administration to restore any sense of order there.
That didn’t stop elected officials, reporters, and “experts” — few if any of whom apparently bothered to read the 300-plus pages of the text — from lauding it as a cure-all for everything wrong with illegal immigration, but to do that they all had to first admit that millions of migrants coming into the country illegally posed a problem.
To track the trajectory of the public’s awareness of the border crisis, just look at the polling. In that December 2022 poll, 24 percent of respondents stated that immigration was a major issue facing America, the third most popular choice after inflation and the economy.
In the same poll conducted in March 2023, just 23 percent of those polled viewed immigration as a major issue facing the country, though it remained in third place after the economy and inflation.
By December 2023, however, immigration rocketed to first place, surpassing even inflation and the economy and the biggest problem identified by 35 percent of those polled. Of course, that month Border Patrol agents set yet another monthly apprehension record, stopping nearly 250,000 illegal migrants at the Southwest border.
Barbara Jordan and the “National Interest” in Immigration. In 1993, President Clinton appointed retired Texas Rep. (and civil-rights icon) Barbara Jordan to serve as chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
It was in that role in September 1994 that Jordan testified before the House Judiciary Committee on efforts to deter unauthorized employment in the United States, and explained:
This country has a problem. It is real. It is immediate. ... If we cannot control illegal immigration, we cannot sustain our national interest in legal immigration. Those who come here illegally, and those who hire them, will destroy the credibility of our immigration policies and their implementation. In the course of that, I fear, they will destroy our commitment to immigration itself.
The previous July, Gallup polled on the exact same question that it did last month, and at that time 65 percent of respondents stated that they wanted to see a decrease in immigration to the United States. When the opinion outfit polled on the same question in June 1995, the same percentage of those polled wanted an immigration cut.
In 1994, the year Jordan made that statement, Border Patrol agents apprehended just over one million illegal migrants at all of the nation’s borders: Southwest, Northern, and Coastal. In just the past 40 months under the Biden administration, agents have made nearly seven times as many apprehensions.
The only thing that’s changed over the past three decades is the attitude of many on the left and in the media — and a few on the right — that illegal immigration is not that big a deal.
Consider the following from Clinton’s January 1995 State of the Union address:
We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
If Clinton uttered those words today, he’d be derided as “anti-immigrant” (or worse, a “racist”), epithets commonly hurled at those who call for any kind of immigration enforcement.
And to that, Jordan had yet another response, this one offered in congressional testimony in February 1995:
To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.
The concept of the “national interest” played a key role in Jordan’s views on immigration, particularly when she noted that “immigration, like foreign policy, ought to be a place where the national interest comes first, last, and always”.
That’s because she understood voters would turn against an immigration policy that wasn’t in the public interest, especially given that, as she explained, “it is both a right and responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest” (emphasis added).
The Biden administration (or whoever’s calling the immigration shots in the White House and DHS) has rejected the argument that our democratic society has any responsibility to manage immigration in its own, national, interest, and I don’t make that statement blithely.
In fact, Biden’s DHS has admitted that fact, albeit obliquely, with Mayorkas asserting in a September 2021 policy memo that:
On his first day in office, President Biden affirmed that "advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government." In the immigration enforcement context, scholars and professors have observed that prosecutorial discretion guidelines are essential to advancing this Administration's stated commitment to "advancing equity for all, including people of color and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality." [Footnotes omitted.]
That’s a roundabout way of saying enforcement restrictions in U.S. immigration law are discriminatory because they unduly impact aliens — in exactly the same way “Jim Crow” unduly impacted the rights of African Americans — and for that reason Biden’s DHS feels an obligation to ignore them on principle.
That single paragraph revealed a shift in the focus of the administration’s immigration policies away from the “national interest” of those in our democratic society (U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants) to the interests of unlawful aliens themselves.
Once the shift in the administration’s immigration policies away from our national interest to the interests of “those who came here illegally” began impacting cities and towns across the United States, it was inevitable, as Barbara Jordan warned, that such policies would “destroy our commitment to immigration itself”. You don’t have to trust me on that — but you should trust Jordan and Gallup.