President Joe Biden visited the U.S.-Mexican border town of Brownsville, Texas, on Thursday to emphasize his increasing focus — and increasingly hawkish posture — on immigration. His visit had an aura of political drama around it because it was on the same day former President Donald Trump visited a separate border town and hammered home the false narrative that the U.S. is overrun by dangerous migrants.
The conventional wisdom among horse race pundits and campaign reporters is that Biden’s border visit, the second of his presidency, reflects a defensive, nervous energy because he’s alarmingly vulnerable on the issue of immigration. Consider how The New York Times, in the run-up to Biden’s visit, framed it for readers:
Immigration has become one of Mr. Biden’s biggest political liabilities as millions of migrants overwhelm the underfunded and underresourced system, something that Republicans like Mr. Trump are keen to highlight. A Gallup poll released on Tuesday found that Americans are most likely to name immigration as the most important problem in the country.
Worrying, right? But a closer look at that poll almost suggests the opposite of what the Times is suggesting: that immigration is not a huge concern for the people Biden should be most concerned about as 2024 approaches. And there’s a lesson in there for how Biden should think about immigration in general.
All this underscores how Biden’s rapid swing to the right on immigration is ill-advised.
The Gallup poll, which ranks what Americans view as the most important issues facing the country on a monthly basis, did show a big uptick in concern with immigration as the top issue in February. But the surge in concern about immigration is mostly among Republicans that Biden has little to no chance of winning anyway. “Currently, 57% of Republicans, up from 37% in January, say immigration is the top problem. Independents show a modest uptick, from 16% in January to 22% now, while there has been no meaningful change among Democrats (9% in January and 10% in February),” according to Gallup. Republicans are uniquely gripped by concerns about immigration, while independents and Democrats largely are not, at least not with nearly the same intensity.
The small percentage of independents who rank immigration as their most important issue is also notable. Typically, a huge chunk of independents lean Republican, so if immigration mania were really seeping into mainstream American consciousness, then that number would be much higher than 22%.
In other words, the Gallup poll does not in and of itself signal a novel political crisis for Biden. Instead it appears to be documenting shifts in the right-wing media cycle: away from inflation and toward immigration. Meanwhile, Biden’s base and many independent or more moderate Republicans are probably not as worried about the issue as one might guess based on popular narratives circulating in the media and among some Democratic Party elites.
All this underscores how Biden’s rapid swing to the right on immigration is ill-advised. Biden has spoken like an immigration hawk with pledges to “shut down the border,” is contemplating an executive action that would restrict asylum, and has backed an immigration bill that the GOP had packed with restrictive policies that would’ve continued Trump’s border wall and ratcheted up ICE resources for detentions (Senate Republicans eventually torpedoed that bill, encouraged by Trump). But who is his audience? There is no way that Biden can win over Trump’s base on immigration. They delight in Trump’s racist framing of migrants as “rapists” who poison the blood of the country and should be arrested and shipped en masse into deportation camps. Biden is at risk of shifting the entire debate on immigration rightward, with very little to gain from it politically. As a result, vulnerable migrants would pay the price as they face harsher policies from both parties.
The Gallup poll is also a reminder of why Trump pushed to derail the bipartisan immigration bill. He didn’t care that it fulfilled many of the goals in the conservative wish list on immigration or that it would have helped address an issue he claims to care about. Trump wanted to make sure he could keep hammering Biden on immigration — and could make sure that the “migrant crisis” could remain top of mind as he revs up his base ahead of Election Day. Because that’s what Trump’s base cares about. Democrats and the media don’t need to play his game.