Poll: Immigration Dents Joe Biden’s Popularity

Every poll is saying that Joe is underwater on immigration.

AP:

“The gap between Biden’s overall approval rating and his handling of immigration crosses party lines. Seventy-four percent of Democrats and 10% of Republicans approve of Biden’s handling of immigration, compared with 96% of Democrats and 22% of Republicans who approve overall.

The difference also comes across racial and ethnic groups. Overall, 92% of Black Americans, 67% of Hispanics and 52% of white Americans say they approve of how Biden is handling his job. On immigration, 74% of Black Americans but only 50% of Hispanics and 34% of white Americans say they approve. …”

New York Post:

“More Americans disapprove of President Biden’s handling of the dramatic influx of unaccompanied children arriving at the southern border than approve, according to a poll released Monday.

O?verall, 40 percent of Americans disapprove of how Biden is controlling the situation at the Mexican border, while just 24 percent approve, an Associated Press-NORC poll found.

Thirty-five percent don’t have an opinion.?

Broken down by political persuasion, 66 percent of Republicans disapprove along with 15 percent of Democrats. 

Only 8 percent of Republicans approve as do 44 percent of Democrats. 

Forty percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans have no opinion. …”

I would say this is a weak spot.

I anticipate it will become a bigger problem as COVID fades. I expect Republicans will keep hammering the issue. They have every incentive to do so. It consolidates their base. Independents are known for their dislike of open borders. The issue also seriously divides Democrats.

The Atlantic as a big new article about how American immigration policy is racist. It is true that Americans never voted for the most sweeping demographic change in world history. They are growing increasingly angry about it because the message never seems to penetrate the political class.

The Atlantic:

“This forgetting has allowed the racism woven into America’s immigration policies to stay submerged beneath the more idealistic vision of the country as “a nation of immigrants.” That vision has a basis in truth: We are a multiethnic, multiracial nation where millions of people have found safety, economic opportunity, and freedoms they may not have otherwise had. Yet racial stereotypes, rooted in eugenics, that portray people with dark skin and foreign passports as being inclined toward crime, poverty, and disease have been part of our immigration policies for so long that we mostly fail to see them. “It’s in our DNA,” Romo says. “It’s ingrained in the culture and in the laws that are produced by that culture.”

The first American immigration laws were written in order to keep the country white, a goal that was explicit in their text for more than 150 years. (Over time, the understanding of “whiteness” changed and expanded. Well into the 20th century, only those of Northern and Western European descent were considered white; Italians and Jews, for instance, were not.) Even after the laws were finally changed, allowing large numbers of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Africa into the country starting in the 1960s, the eugenic ideas that supported earlier versions of them remained embedded in our society, and still provide the basis of many modern restrictions. …

When the Pilgrims crossed the ocean to settle in the New World, they brought with them ideas that would evolve into “manifest destiny,” which held that the United States was a land that had been bestowed by God on Anglo-Saxon white people. In 1790, the first American Congress made citizenship available only to any “free white person” who had been in the country for at least two years. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act blocked Chinese immigrants—and in 1917, it was expanded to block most Asians living between Afghanistan and the Pacific. These laws were upheld numerous times by federal courts, including in a seminal Supreme Court case from 1922, in which the government prevailed by arguing that citizenship should be granted as the Founders intended: “only to those whom they knew and regarded as worthy to share it with them, men of their own type, white men.” …”

Yes, it is true.

It wasn’t until the post-World War II era that the American political establishment became committed to antiracism, modernism and cosmopolitanism and redefined the country along those lines.