President Joe Biden inspects the U.S.–Mexico border with CBP officers, January 8, 2023
For a moment it seemed as though there had finally been a break in the once–reliably partisan pattern in public opinion. And it wasn’t the break we had been expecting: Gallup finds that 19 percent of Democrats now want less immigration compared with just 2 percent of Democrats who expressed this desire two years ago.
But this isn’t an all time-high in Democratic dissatisfaction; it isn’t even the highest it has been in the past decade. 20, 23, and 37 (!) percent of Democrats wanted reduced immigration in 2016, 2015, and 2012.
What’s notable in these latest public-opinion-poll results, however, is that the gap between the 70 percent of Republicans who say they want less immigration (this is the highest rate recorded this century) and the 19 percent of Democrats who agree with them remains stable. That’s right: It appears that, despite some intraparty movement in attitudes, the inter-party division is about as wide as it was when President Trump was inaugurated. After a moment’s relief (that there hasn’t been further deterioration), one can’t help but wonder why we’ve made no progress since.
The causes of cultural trends are many and mazelike, but take an honest look at what has happened since 2021: Somehow, the Biden administration has managed to have the sort of effect on the socio-economic salience of this issue that his predecessor could only dream of. He has made immigration controversial enough and troubling enough even for Democrats and independents, while exacerbating Republicans’ fears and all but ensuring that they’ll vote on this issue again—and against him—in 2024.
Nod in approval of:
Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) who helped organize, and joined a group of his peers on, a drive from El Paso to southern New Mexico to visit the Southwest border. In a Congress likely to do hardly any work, the Texan isn’t itching to soft-quit just yet.
John Cornyn greets then–CBP Acting Deputy Commissioner Ronald D. Vitiello in Washington, D.C., May 23, 2017
Alex Nowrasteh and Jessica Vaughan, who duked it out on an episode of Bari Weiss’s Honestly (the podcast of the charismatic young journalist whom the New York Times foolishly chased away in 2020), guest-moderated by Kmele Foster. I found the arguments voiced from one of the two directions far more convincing, but we should applaud the act of the debate as such. More of this, please.
Stephen Yale-Loehr and Cornell Law, who organized an excellent immigration-policy event at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., last week. I’ll link you to the recording when it becomes available, in next month’s missive.
From left to right: Stephen Yale-Loehr (Cornell Law), Muzaffar Chishti (Migration Policy Institute), Kristie De Peña (Niskanen Center), Glenn Hamer (Texas Association of Business), Matthew Johnson (Klein/Johnson Group), Rebecca Tallent (National Immigration Forum)
Squint skeptically at:
Public opinion and public-opinion polls.
The U.K. is now “among the most accepting countries for foreign workers,” reads a headline in the Guardian. How did this happen in a country whose separation from a free labor market was finalized just two years ago? Perhaps one invariably misses what one no longer has. Or perhaps the fact (and perception) that Britain has regained control of her borders assuaged the public’s anxiety of powerlessness that had driven its anti-immigration sentiment in the first place.
NYC’s Eric Adams, the mayor of a “sanctuary city” who is reportedly handing migrants free bus tickets to Canada. (Quebec’s immigration minister now points out that migrants should be seeking asylum in their first country of arrival.) Can we finally—in all honesty—acknowledge that the situation at the Southwest border is indeed a crisis, and allow ourselves to negotiate a solution?