As if to provide a post-mortem on the unpopularity and polarization of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies, UK journal The Economist and opinion outfit YouGov have released the results of their latest post-election poll. Dig deep and you will find lingering concerns about the continuing costs of the largest illegal migrant surge in U.S. history.
YouGov surveyed 1,552 U.S. adults aged 18 and older, and more importantly 1,415 registered voters. The poll has a margin of +/- 3.2 percent with respect to the latter.
Biden Job Approval. Joe Biden exits the White House with some of the lowest job approval ratings in modern history — 36 percent generally and 40 percent among registered voters.
As with most Economist/YouGov polls, this one is Democrat-heavy, so it’s likely best to focus on the fact that among Independent voters, Biden is 36 points underwater, with 25 percent of the politically homeless approving of the job he has done as president compared to 61 percent of them who disapprove.
Interestingly, although respondents were asked about the president’s performance in various areas like jobs, the economy, climate change, and abortion, YouGov pollsters didn’t ask for opinions on the job Biden has done on immigration.
Biden’s immigration performance is usually one of the hallmarks of this poll, so it’s notable that it wasn’t included. Or perhaps YouGov did ask, and the responses were too dreadful to include.
Issue Importance of Immigration. Respondents were also asked how important various issues were to them, and immigration did make that cut.
Overall, 83 percent of respondents — and 85 percent of registered voters — said that immigration was either very important (51 percent generally and 56 percent of voters) or somewhat important (32 percent overall and 29 percent of the electorate) to them.
Interesting, Blacks (84 percent) and Hispanics (86 percent) were slightly more likely to say immigration was important to them than Whites (83 percent).
By comparison, when YouGov polled on this question in late October directly before the election, Whites (88 percent) were much more likely than Blacks (79 percent) and slightly more likely than Hispanics (85 percent) to identify immigration as an important issue.
All of that said, Whites were more likely in the latest poll to say that immigration was “very important” (53 percent) to them than either Blacks (44 percent) or Hispanics (48 percent) were.
That may have something to do with the fact that Blacks and to a lesser degree Hispanics are more likely to be Democrats, and Democrats were the least likely respondents in that poll to identify immigration as an important issue.
Just 38 percent of the president’s fellow partisans believe that immigration is a very important issue, compared to 39 percent of Independents and a whopping 77 percent of self-described Republicans.
“Most Important Issue”. Which leads me to what is likely the most important question (from my somewhat parochial standpoint) in that poll, in which respondents were asked to identify the most important issue to them personally.
YouGov offered respondents 15 different choices, and inflation/prices came out on top, the most important issue for more than a fifth (21 percent) of respondents overall.
When it came to overall respondents, “jobs and the economy” came in a distant second (16 percent) followed by “health care” (15 percent), and then immigration in fourth place at 10 percent.
Of course, elections in this country are not decided by American adults but rather by American adults who have registered to vote. And those results tell a somewhat different story.
When registered voters were polled, once again 21 percent identified inflation as the most important issue in their lives, but jobs, health care, and immigration all tied for second place at 12 percent. And the reason why is the partisan skew over immigration.
Just 3 percent of Democrats said that immigration was their most important issue, while 23 percent of Republicans did (immigration was the most important issue for 5 percent of Independents). In fact, amongst GOP voters, immigration was the second most important “most important issue”.
Notably, that Democratic response was identical to the response they gave in the late October poll, but while Republicans are feeling a little better about immigration in the wake of President-elect Trump’s victory (25 percent of them said immigration was their top issue in the earlier poll), they are still wary.
The Border Spigot and the Domestic Challenges. And they are likely wary for good reasons that have nothing to do with the expressed immigration policies of the incoming administration.
Donald Trump will almost definitely turn off the spigot of aliens coming illegally through the border and the ports, but his White House and DHS will have their hands full in dealing with the eight million-plus aliens who have arrived illegally over the past four years.
That task will likely be impeded not only by Democrats who still hold a significant number of seats in the Senate and (especially) the House, but also by a mainstream media that is already issuing apocalyptic warnings about the impacts “mass deportation” will have on the economy, health care, education, and agriculture in a clear and ongoing attempt to sway public opinion.
And you can add foreign relations to that list as well, with AP recently warning that Honduras may “end[] US military cooperation over Trump mass deportation threat”.
Apparently, the country’s leftist president, Xiomara Castro, carped in her New Year’s Day speech that: “Faced with a hostile attitude of mass expulsion of our brothers, we would have to consider a change of our cooperation policies with the United States, especially in the military realm.”
That speech and its veiled threats also received coverage in the New York Times, but oddly, neither the Times nor AP paid much attention back in September when Castro’s government withdrew from the 112-year-old extradition treaty between the two countries, triggering street protests in Tegucigalpa.
Those were salient events given that Honduras was being promoted at the time as a shining example of the successes of Vice President (and then-Democratic presidential candidate) Kamala Harris’s “root causes” strategy to address illegal migration.
Keep in mind that an estimated5 percent of President Castro’s constituents live in the United States and contributed 27 percent of Honduras’s gross domestic product in 2022, so she likely doesn’t have much to lose by attempting to impede returns to her country and quite a bit to potentially gain, given she’s up for reelection and had a 42 percent approval rating of her own in September.
Those finer points will likely be elided by a (largely objectively hostile) press interested in painting Trump’s immigration policies are somehow uniquely dangerous to our diplomatic relations and an outlier among recent administrations.
I’ve recently explained in depth how it was the Biden-Harris immigration policies that were the true exception to the rule, but then my prior rebuttals of “reckless hyper [immigration] enforcement” during Trump I largely fell on deaf ears, so I’m not sanguine about reaching many who don’t already agree with my latest assessment.
While the latest Economist/YouGov poll sidesteps the unpopularity of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policies, read deep and you’ll find that concerns over those policies helped drive GOP voters to the polls. Those voters are likely happy with the outcome, but are plainly still worried about the lingering impacts of the four-year migrant surge.