From ... in Social issues — May 28, 2022

Poll: Just One in Five Say Biden's Migration Policy Is 'Right Track'

Almost two out of three voters think President Joe Biden is taking the United States in the wrong direction on immigration, according to a poll by YouGov.com.

Sixty-two percent believe Biden’s immigration policy is taking the nation on the wrong track, the May 21-24 poll of 1,500 adult citizens — which was conducted for The Economist magazine — found. Just 18 percent — or fewer than one in five — support Biden’s approach to immigration policy.

These deeply negative numbers are politically important because 70 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of independents say immigration issues are “very important,” the poll reported. In contrast, Democrats are edging away from the issue, with only 35 percent saying immigration is “very important.” However, the GOP has yet to win the trust of a majority of voters on migration policy, even as Biden and his deputies are inviting millions of mostly poor migrants across the U.S. border and into Americans’ jobs, housing, and communities. Just 47 percent of registered voters trust Republicans in Congress to handle immigration issues, said a May 2022-22 poll of 2,005 registered voters. Sixteen percent — or one in six Americans — did not back either party, according to the poll by Morning Consult for Politico. But the 47 percent is an improvement over the feeble 41 percent trust revealed in a December 2021 poll by the Wall Street Journal. One likely reason for the GOP’s failure to win the public’s trust on immigration is the lack of GOP messaging about the pocketbook impact of migration on family budgets, whether in the border states or in the heartland. GOP leaders are under intense pressure from donors to ignore the pocketbook economics of migration.

The danger for business is that any pocketbook message might help the GOP win extra seats in Congress. But those wins would then oblige GOP leaders to pass laws that would curb the inflow of wage-deflating, rent-spiking, illegal and legal migrants that are coveted by business leaders. For example, Wall Street’s leading investment firm, Goldman Sachs, issued a report on May 23 urging Biden to deduct roughly $100 billion from Americans’ wages in one year by importing 2.5 million extra foreign workers. After President Donald Trump’s migration cuts, “the substantial gap between the number of workers and the number of jobs ... has led to wage growth of 5 1/2% over the last year,” the firm complained. “We have estimated that the [worker] gap would need to close by around 2 1⁄2 million [extra migrants] to return wage growth to the [lower] 4-41⁄2% range,” said the report, which recognizes that legal migrants have a similar economic impact as illegal migrants. Just 29 percent of liberals support the Biden policy on immigration — while 44 percent of them oppose it — according to YouGov. But the second-strongest support for Biden’s easy-migration policy comes from people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the YouGov poll. Twenty-eight percent of the high-income group support the policy, and just 56 percent oppose the policy.

The donor pressure helps to explain why GOP leaders prefer to talk about non-pocketbook issues, such as dramatic border chaos, crime, drugs, population replacement, and illegal migration, despite near-uniform Democratic support for a low-wage, high-migration economy. That lack of focus on the economic aspects of the issue is also pushed by the establishment media. Since 1990, the federal government has extracted millions of migrants from poor countries to work in the U.S. economy via legal and illegal migration. That policy has impoverished many millions of blue-collar and white-collar Americans while enriching coastal investors, Fortune 500 executives, employers, and many professionals in protected careers. An April 20 report by the Pew Research Center showed how wealth has shifted since 1970 amid accelerating immigration. “In 2020, the median income of upper-income households was 7.3 times that of lower-income households, up from 6.3 in 1970,” Pew reported, adding: In 2021, about four-in-ten adults with at least a bachelor’s degree (39%) were in the upper-income tier, compared with 16% or less among those without a bachelor’s degree.

The share of adults in the upper-income tier with at least a bachelor’s degree edged up from 1971 to 2021, while the share without a bachelor’s degree either edged down or held constant.

The U.S. middle class “has been barely keeping up,” Isabel Sawhill, an expert at the Brookings Institution, told Yahoo.com.

The site noted: Their incomes [after accounting for inflation, taxes, and government benefits] have gone up a little bit, but not very much. And the fact that their incomes haven’t gone up very much for over four decades, tells you a lot because normally we’d expect middle-class incomes over that period of time to grow a lot.

The YouGov poll includes bad news for Biden’s campaign team, according to Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies. He wrote on May 27: Biden 2020 voters may be feeling some buyer’s remorse if immigration was their deciding issue in the last presidential election. A plurality of those who voted for the president (47 percent) believed that the United States was on the wrong track on immigration, compared to 27 percent who felt things were headed in the right direction. Most ominously for the president’s fellow Democrats, Independents — critical swing voters in midterm elections like those that will be held this November — are more sour when it comes to the subject: 68 percent of the uncommitted fall into the wrong-track group, while a mere 13 percent believe that we are headed generally in the right direction when it comes to immigration. If the president’s immigration policies are intended to curry the favor of Hispanic voters, he may want to try a different tack. A plurality of respondents in this cohort (48 percent) believe that the United States is on the wrong track when it comes to immigration, compared to 25 percent who think the country is headed in the right direction. Extraction Migration Since at least 1990, the D.C. establishment has extracted tens of millions of migrants and visa workers from poor countries to serve as legal or illegal workers, temporary workers, consumers, and renters for various U.S. investors and CEOs. This economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point. It is brutal to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities, shrinks their salaries and wages, raises their housing costs, and has shoved at least ten million American men out of the labor force. Extraction migration also distorts the economy, damages professionals’ prospects, and curbs Americans’ productivity, partly because it allows employers to use stoop labor instead of machines. Migration also reduces voters’ political clout, undermines employees’ workplace rights, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ big coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland and southern states. An economy built on extraction migration also alienates young people and polarizes Americans’ democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture because it allows wealthy elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

The economic policy is hidden behind a variety of high-minded narratives.

These include the claim that the U.S. is a “Nation of Immigrants,” that Americans have a duty to accept foreign refugees, and that the government should be able to import a different population. But the progressives’ colonialism-like economic strategy reduces overseas investment, kills many migrants, exploits poor people, and splits foreign families as it siphons human capital from its source countries. This economic policy is backed by progressives who wish to transform the U.S. from a society governed by Western civic culture into a progressive-directed empire of feuding identity groups. “We’re trying to become the first multiracial, multi-ethnic superpower in the world,” Rep. Rohit Khanna (D-CA) told the New York Times on March 21. “It will be an extraordinary achievement ... we will ultimately triumph,” he boasted. Not surprisingly, the wealth-shifting extraction migration policy is very unpopular, according to a wide variety of polls.

These polls show deep and broad public opposition to labor migration and the inflow of foreign contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The opposition is growing. It is anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, inclusive, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.

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