It’s hard to believe, but once upon a time, immigration was a subject that President Trump dominated. It even won him what was believed by everyone but Republican and independent voters to be a ridiculous run for the White House.
In 2020, though, Trump rarely made a peep about his most potent issue, the one that inspired a slogan chanted by hundreds of thousands of his supporters at rallies across the country: “Build. The. Wall!”
No, though Trump’s administration had spent his term building hundreds of miles of new walls on the southern border, slowed down the thousands of bogus asylum claims coming up from Central America, and cut the immigration growth rate by two-thirds, Trump wasn’t so interested in talking up his success in that area. He chose instead to spend the campaign defending his handling of the pandemic (an argument that he could never win, even if he’s right) and grieving over the “WITCH HUNT” impeachment and “ILLEGAL” spying on his campaign.
Immigration came up in neither of the presidential debates.
That being said, it’s strange to see Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas say that the election, which Joe Biden appears to have won, “was a referendum on the wall.”
How would he figure? No one has talked about the wall since last year.
Some polls throughout Trump’s term went from showing strong support for his positions on immigration to opposing them. But as we just saw in the election, polls always, always, always discount anything attached to Trump — by a lot.
People who support the president or his positions simply don’t want to be associated with him.
It doesn’t matter now. Even if the voters support getting a grip on our jungle of an immigration system, they chose Biden, who plans to halt the construction of more border wall and undo the executive actions Trump enacted to stop migrant caravans from invading the country.
A Biden victory was a referendum on Trump. It wasn’t about the wall.
