Voters are more anxious about illegal immigration, but Democrats seem oblivious to the problem.
It’s hard to know the extent to which President Biden’s job-approval tribulations can be linked to the continuing chaos at the southern border. But we know that illegal immigration has become a top concern of voters, and the amnesty provisions that Democrats want included in their Build Back Better reconciliation bill are unlikely to help matters.
Anxiety about illegal immigration typically increases during economic downturns, when foreign workers get blamed for unemployment. That’s obviously not the situation today. The economy is not in recession, and the number of available jobs far exceeds the number of people looking for work, even as employers have increased pay and offered signing bonuses to attract new employees. The current concern about illegal immigration has less to do with the labor market and more to do with the hundreds of thousands of people entering the country illegally while Biden administration officials play down the crisis or sit on their hands.
Border apprehensions, a proxy for illegal entries, rose to nearly 1.7 million in the past year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. That’s the highest number ever, surpassing the record set under the Clinton administration in 2000. These newcomers are not only straining education and housing resources in border communities but also arriving at a time when the country is still dealing with pandemic-related health issues.
Voters have taken note. A poll conducted by Quinnipiac University last month asked respondents to choose the “most urgent issue facing the country today.” Immigration ranked third, behind the economy and Covid. It ranked second among independent voters and higher among women than men. Independents and women both played key roles in electing Mr. Biden. The survey also found that opposition to a border wall has softened significantly. More people—49% versus 46%—still oppose walling off our southern neighbor, but that is “the lowest level of opposition to building a wall along the border with Mexico since November 2016 when the question was first asked,” the pollsters noted. And it’s down from a high of 64% opposed to a border wall in 2017.
The Quinnipiac findings were echoed in a separate survey last month by Morning Consult for Politico. Nearly half the respondents (47%) said they were “very concerned” about illegal immigration, and another 26% were “somewhat concerned.” Again, women were more worried than men, and suburbanites—another important swing voting bloc—also expressed high levels of dissatisfaction with the administration’s border policies.
Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress have been focused on passing a Build Back Better bill with immigration provisions that would add to these anxieties, some of which are shared by fellow Democrats from states or districts Donald Trump carried in 2020. In a bow to party progressives, Democrats want to extend some form of amnesty, or legalization, to millions of undocumented residents and make it more difficult to deport not only people who enter the country illegally but also those who commit crimes here. They want to do this through the budget-reconciliation process with no input from Republicans. And they want to do it without adding any significant border-security provisions to deter illegal immigration.
This is another example of the Biden administration’s policy ambitions surpassing its mandate. When voters give a president an evenly divided Senate and a razor-thin House majority, they have not given him license to ram through a mass amnesty or to make broad changes to U.S. immigration policy on a party-line vote.
For many years, polling has shown that a majority of Democrats and Republicans sympathize with people who sneak inside the country in search of work and a better life. Bipartisan support for legalizing the status of young adults brought here unlawfully as children—the so-called Dreamers—is especially deep. Still, the political reality is that most voters understand that we’re a nation of laws, including immigration laws that are being flouted without consequence under this administration. White House officials pay lip service to border security, but messages don’t get more mixed than telling people not to come here while simultaneously drawing up plans for the largest amnesty in the nation’s history.
These columns have long advocated expanding legal immigration to reduce pressure on the border, but not as a stand-alone measure. Making it clear to would-be migrants that they must use the front door is also necessary, both as a practical matter and as a way of garnering support from Republicans who fear that Democrats are more interested in erasing the border than in fixing it.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal