Immigration has emerged as a weak point for President Joe Biden as he presides over one of the largest migrant surges at the southern border in years, a crisis showing little sign of abating.
More than 172,000 migrants rushed the border last month alone, based on government apprehension statistics. That number included nearly 19,000 unaccompanied minors. While the White House has blamed a number of different factors for the border problem — weather, conditions in the migrants’ home countries, the reality of occasional surges that happen under presidents of both parties — the Biden administration has conceded that the “hope” created by its approach to immigration policy has played a role.
As a result, Biden’s job approval ratings on immigration and the border considerably lag his numbers on other major issues. A recent poll by the Associated Press and the NORC center for Public Affairs Research found that only 24% of adults approved of how Biden has handled the flood of young migrants, compared to 40% who disapproved.
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Even among Democrats, the split was 44% who approved to 40% who neither approved nor disapproved. Two-thirds of Republicans disapproved.
On border security more generally, 55% disapproved of how Biden was performing his job to 44% who approved. On immigration, the numbers were 56% disapproval to 42% approval. This is a stark reversal of the president’s overall approval rating in the same poll: 61% approve, 38% disapprove.
For Republicans, this could be an opening to undercut confidence in the Biden administration’s competence beyond the border. Right now, there is strong approval for his handling of both COVID-19 and the economy, two issues Democratic operatives maintained would decide their success ahead of next year’s midterm elections, as Biden piles up multitrillion spending bills.
GOP attitudes on immigration appear to be hardening. A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken as the border situation began to deteriorate in February found that 77% of Republicans wanted more security fencing, up 6 points from 2015, and 56% opposed a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, up 18 points from 2018.
“While we are in favor of the wall and border security, we want to protect the very thing that makes people want to immigrate here,” said a Texas Republican, citing the rule of law.
Even as most Democratic elected officials have stayed away, GOP members of Congress and border state legislatures have been conducting tours of the facilities at which migrants are being detained and surrounding areas. Rank-and-file Republican voters are increasingly telling pollsters immigration and border security are their top issues, creating the possibility that this will drive conservative turnout in the midterm elections in the same way that tax increases did in 1994 and Obamacare did in 2010.
In those two elections, Republicans gained 52 and 63 House seats, respectively. That was enough to win the majority both times, in the former case for the first time in 40 years. Democrats currently hold exactly 218 House seats, just enough for a bare majority, and Republicans would need only a net gain of seven to strip House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of her gavel. The Senate is similarly split 50-50, with Democrats in control only because Vice President Kamala Harris, one of Biden’s point people on dealing with the countries at the center of the migrant surge, holds a tiebreaking vote.
“The vice president has been truly flippant on this issue,” the Texas Republican said, adding that GOP officials in the state use expletives to describe their interactions with the administration on the border.
But it is still a long way to 2022, and Republicans will need to build a broader case against Biden and the Democrats than just one issue. This is especially true as long as Biden’s big-ticket spending proposals continue to poll strongly — including, the president often argues, among self-described GOP voters.
“Well, I think it’s a starting point of a conversation that will lead to folks having some regret about voting for Biden,” said Republican strategist John Feehery. “His radical policies don’t work and aren’t particularly well thought out. Incompetence at the border begets defunding the police, which leads to anti-growth tax policy and out-of-control spending.”
Republicans largely blame the border crisis on Biden’s reversal of former President Donald Trump’s immigration policies, including requirements that asylum applicants remain in the United States while their cases are being adjudicated, and signals that minors will not be expelled.
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Democrats counter that the Trump administration left processes for humanely processing migrants in shambles. They are hopeful a new deal with Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala brokered by the White House can restore some semblance of order.
“I am not sure that all Americans care as much about the border as does the media, but it does help to show the general incompetence and radicalism of this administration,” Feehery added.
