January 10, 2024
Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.
The American People say Border is in Crisis, Demand Biden be Tougher on Immigrants and Deport Them to Mexico While They Await Hearings
By Bill Wilson
An explosive new poll proves that Biden and the Democratic Party’s approach to the southern border crisis – neglect, blame-shifting and a refusal to face facts – is creating a massive backlash among the American people against the modern immigration system. In three short years, the American public have shifted from mild tolerance of our porous southern border to labeling the border a national security concern and a massive crisis that they demand the next administration solves.
Immigration is now the second most important issue facing the country according to the latest CBS News / YouGov poll, with 21% of Americans citing immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border as the most important issue facing the country, while 29% say the economy is the most important. Support for Biden’s immigration policy is now at its lowest point on record, and an increasing number of Americans see the border as a crisis compared to ten months ago and want harsher treatment of illegals.
The poll shows Biden’s approval rating on the U.S./Mexico border crisis has fallen to its lowest point on record, with Americans giving Biden negative marks by a margin of 70% to 30%. By a margin of 63% to 16%, Americans believe the Biden Administration should be tougher on illegal immigrants.
The poll also shows the share of Americans who say the border is in crisis has risen seven percentage points since last May, from 38% to 45% presently. In addition, some 81% of Americans who say the border is in crisis cite national security as a key concern for why they feel this way.
Democrats, in particular, are growing weary of the modern policy of transporting illegal immigrants from largely Republican border states to largely Democratic-run northern states.
Republican governors in hot-bed states for illegal immigration such as Florida, Arizona and Texas began to revolt against the onslaught of illegal immigrants and bus them into “sanctuary” cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. However, Democrats – and independents – are much less supportive of this policy. According to the poll, Democrats disapprove of border states shipping migrants to northern states by a margin of 66% to 34%, and Independents disapprove 56% to 44%. Republicans favor the practice narrowly, 53% to 47%.
In addition, the share of Americans willing to “temporarily house migrants” in their own towns has decreased seven percentage points since last May. Americans now reject the idea of being forced to temporarily house migrants in their town 55% to 45%, a reversal from May 2023 when the public narrowly supported this practice, 52% to 48%.
What is more, an increasing share of Americans say they notice an influx of immigrants into their cities, with 40% saying they notice immigrants to their area increasing compared to 25% who say the numbers are decreasing.
When asked what should be done with asylum-seekers at the U.S. Mexican border, over half of the public (57%) believes the asylum seekers should either remain in Mexico and wait for a hearing or be deported permanently. Just 43% of the public believes illegals should be allowed to remain the United States while waiting for a hearing.
Notably, we see a continuation of a distinctly negative view of immigration’s long-term impact, with the public saying 48% to 22% that the influx of migrants will make society worse in the long term.
According to Gallup, the share of Americans who say immigration is a good thing has dropped precipitously by nine percentage points in three years since Biden took office, from 77% in 2020 to 68% today. October polling from YouGov showed Americans are deeply concerned about the toll illegal immigration is taking on the country, and broadly reject the idea of expanding the refugee program.
The poll asked Americans whether the United States should or should not accept refugees from Syria, Gaza, El Salvador, and Ukraine, and Americans strongly oppose accepting refugees from all countries except Ukraine.
Americans do not believe the U.S. should accept refugees from El Salvador by a fifteen-percentage point margin, 45% to 30%, even though El Salvador is one of the regions the Biden Administration is greatly expanding entry from. Americans don’t believe the U.S. should accept refugees from Syria by a fourteen-percentage point margin, 46% to 32%, and Americans reject the idea of accepting refugees from Gaza by a thirteen-percentage point margin, 46% to 33%.
According to the poll, only around a third of Americans (34%) say immigration makes the United States better off, and support for expanding the refugee program is even lower. Just 29% of Americans say refugees improve the U.S. compared to 39% who say they do not, a ten-percentage point difference.
These numbers come on top of polling from Reuters/ Ipsos that showed Americans say 54% to 46% that immigration is contributing to increased difficulties for native-born Americans. Concerns about elevated crime and a slew of drugs and other smuggled items streaming over the southern border are major drivers behind this shift in sentiment on immigration. Strains on U.S. resources are also a concern.
Biden and the Democratic Party’s refusal to secure the border and deport those who break the law and enter our country illegally has created one of the most anti-immigration generations in decades. By refusing to enforce the laws, and denying proper funding to our border patrol, globalists have turned one of the most hospitable counties on earth against an immigration system many Americans now view as exploitative and unfair. These views are rising not only on the right, but among Independents and Democrats as well, who are increasingly dissatisfied with the lawlessness of the modern immigration system, and demand the laws be enforced.
Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.
Video: Illegals Occupy New York City High School
To view online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beWCljs3pT0
Only 19 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents think Republicans or the American people should be allowed to vote for their choice for president
By Robert Romano
Only 19 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of independents believe that former President Donald Trump should be allowed to stand for election in 2024 following moves by the states of Colorado and Maine to remove Trump from the Republican primary and general election ballot, according to the latest CBS News-YouGov poll taken Jan. 3 to Jan. 5.
Instead, 81 percent of Democrats and 44 percent of independents think states should take Trump’s name off the ballot.
That is, even if that’s who Republicans want to nominate as their candidate for president or who the American people want to vote for in 2024. These voters simply think it’s okay for the government to intervene and remove their political opponents from the ballot, disenfranchising millions of Americans and making it so only state-approved candidates can run.
The context is important, which is the belief that states, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 3 can, without any trial or conviction, simply declare a candidate to be an insurrectionist. It’s “self-executing,” don’t you know?
In the meantime, very few of those in the political class appear to be considering how very dangerous both the push to control who appears on the ballot and now its seeming popularity is to the very cohesion of the Union.
We are in deep trouble, and only the Supreme Court, which is set to hear this case in February, can save us at this time—and even then, allowing Trump onto the ballot is only a stopgap, a band-aid for what ails us.
For years, we have been treated with commentary by establishment institutions and their mouthpieces about how the Republican primary was revealed in 2016 to be “vulnerable” to a populist like Trump to run and win. This was a problem that needed to be solved, because Trump wasn’t supposed to win in 2016.
This is the same thinking that led to the counterintelligence investigation of Trump in 2016 for opposing U.S. intervention in Ukraine on the campaign trail. That ipso facto made Trump a Russian agent, and so the campaign was put under a top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) dragnet.
To be fair, that’s how apparently how government surveillance and witch hunts have always operated off of association fallacies. It’s dressed up as an entirely sophisticated process with warrants, oaths, affirmations but it’s just a façade state-run paranoia.
Candidates aren’t allowed to oppose U.S. foreign policy, didn’t you know? They are not allowed to propose alternatives to current policy, or else the state will intervene. They’ll show you!
These are not the actions of a free country. Instead, they are the actions of a country so corrupted, only a very small majority believe that we should even have a free and fair election in 2024 where we the people get to choose both who should run and then who should win.
Shame on all those who have stoked these fires and condoned these actions for years, all in a vain attempt to stop one person from serving as president who, no matter how unorthodox, had every right to do so — and the American people had every right to select.
The danger this time around is that whichever side loses has a powerful incentive not to accept the outcome after two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, replete with challenges from both parties and successful campaigns to delegitimize their outcomes. No one is innocent.
To make this stick, Trump’s removal would require unanimity among Democrats and a majority of independents. They have neither for this question, which makes their campaign platform "Vote for us! We're tyrants and will suppress the opposition party (again)!" They don’t have it — yet. But they are very close.
That should be frightening, but apparently, knowledge of our mutual freedoms and the conditions and institutions for protecting them are so alien, so forgotten that we are oblivious to the dark abyss that is directly ahead of us.
All that said, the number of Democrats and Independents willing to remove their political opponents from the ballot should be highly alarming. Only a narrow majority support a free and fair election. We're on the brink and only cooler heads can help to see us through this if the Constitution and Union are going back out the other end.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.