A rare analyst to have glimpsed Hillary Clinton’s defeats against Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Marie-Christine Bonzom has covered seven presidential elections and five presidencies. At the invitation of Dutyshe occasionally puts her expert eye on the 2024 presidential campaign.
In the United States, pro-Palestinian demonstrators have replaced migrants from around the world crowding the country’s southern border on screens. But illegal immigration remains the main concern of Americans and one of the greatest vulnerabilities of president-candidate Joe Biden.
In April, and for the third month in a row, the unprecedented flow of illegal immigrants is “the most important problem facing the country,” according to Americans polled by Gallup. In an open question from the polling institute, which therefore does not suggest answers to respondents, immigration is cited as the first concern.
Gallup points out that this is the first time that a presidential campaign has been dominated by this issue. Other institutes confirm the preeminence of immigration in the minds of Americans, particularly in those of registered voters.
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), nearly 10 million undocumented aliens have been apprehended by or presented to agents since Biden became president. A record which, however, does not include illegal migrants who entered the country without any contact with the CBP, which estimates their number at 2 million.
The vast majority of arrivals take place at the border with Mexico. 2021, 2022 and 2023 broke all records for illegal entries at this border, a total of 7.9 million. Last December alone, 302,000 illegal entries were noted by CBP at the southern border, an all-time monthly high. But the northern border is also experiencing an increase in illegal entries, and it is through Canada that most of the terrorism suspects subsequently identified by the US authorities have arrived.
The security ramifications of the historic migration crisis are significant. In March, the FBI director notably revealed that “one of the human and drug trafficking cartels has ties to the Islamic State group that are of great concern to us” and that “the FBI has seized at the borders during over the past two years, sufficient quantities of the opioid fentanyl to kill 270 million people.
The migration crisis no longer only concerns the regions bordering Mexico. Before the House in April, indigenous leaders from the American Northwest deplored the infiltration of their territories by drug traffickers and migrants. Jeffrey Stiffarm, of the Gros Ventre Nation, who chairs a reservation in Montana, even revealed that a colleague had given up testifying to Congress because of death threats from these criminal groups. In Chicago, where the Democratic Party’s inaugural convention will be held in August, African-Americans criticize the black mayor of this Democratic stronghold of housing illegal immigrants in predominantly black neighborhoods that the municipality has long neglected.
Biden out of step
The overwhelming majority of Americans tell pollsters that illegal immigration is a “serious or very serious problem” (84%). Two thirds speak of a “crisis” (including 53% of Democratic voters), or even an “invasion” (11 points more than in 2022).
Generally in favor of legal immigration, Americans believe that illegal immigration undermines the rule of law, is unfair to legal immigrants, and aggravates the scourge of drugs and crime. No less than 86% even see illegal immigration as a “significant or critical threat to the vital interests of the United States.” That’s six points more than a year ago.
In this matter, Biden is completely out of step with his compatriots. Until very recently, the president, who only visited the southern border for the first time in January 2023, alternated between silence, denial and minimization. Only in January 2024 did he admit that the southern border is “not secure” and that the country was facing a “crisis.”
In the wake of this semantic evolution, Biden assures that the crisis requires “huge changes” and that he wants to “close the border”. But he does not convince: 57% of Americans believe that Biden “dismissed the issue” during his State of the Union speech. Even more important: 64% of independents, the dominant category of the electorate which decides between the candidates, think that the president “did not respond adequately” to the problem.
Immigration is the issue on which Biden is most dissatisfied in average polls, and has been since mid-2021. Even before the disastrous management of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the migration crisis initiated for Biden a decline in the polls from which the president has never recovered since he has remained well below 50% satisfied since that summer.
The United States has experienced other crises relating to illegal immigration, especially in the mid-1980s under Reagan and at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s under Clinton and Bush Jr. Today, Biden rightly points out that the problem has structural causes, in the countries of departure and in the US legal immigration system. But the majority of Americans agree that Biden is primarily responsible for the current migration crisis, because he “created an open border policy and a historic flood of migrants.”
73% believe that, contrary to what Biden claims, the president has the means to act without waiting for new legislation from Congress. The vast majority of Americans, including 78% of independents and even 56% of Democrats, want Biden to take tougher action on the southern border.
Trump as an example
In an unprecedented crisis, most Americans want unprecedented measures, including some measures advocated by former President Donald Trump.
The Republican candidate’s proposals find considerable support even among Biden voters, among whom 42% are in favor of mass expulsions of illegal immigrants, 35% want the total closure of the southern border and 30% call for an end to automatic acquisition of American nationality by the law of the soil.
Illegal immigration partly explains why Biden lost the support of many blacks, some of whom gravitate towards Trump, African-Americans generally being more opposed to immigration, illegal or not, than their compatriots.
Moreover, certain emblematic measures of the Trump presidency receive more support today than then. This is particularly the case with the extension of the border wall and the requirement for migrants to wait in Mexico until their entry request is examined.
Candidate Trump, who opposes a proposed bipartisan legislative agreement on immigration before the election, often makes outrageous remarks about illegal immigrants, who, according to him, “poison the blood of our country”. But at this point, the majority of Americans prefer Trump over Biden to handle immigration. It is in fact on this subject that Trump, poll after poll, obtains his biggest advantage against Biden. A study for ABC News published in early May shows Trump with a 17-point lead over Biden on immigration. The situation was opposite during the 2020 presidential election.
While 2024 could break successive annual records for illegal entries into the United States established from 2021, this crisis is a major issue for Americans in view of the presidential election. Three-quarters of them indicate that this issue will be “very important”, or even “extremely important” in their vote.