Posted on Monday, October 28, 2024
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by Andrew Shirley
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A new poll from Newsweek has revealed that even a majority of voters who say they plan to back Kamala Harris on November 5 support former President Donald Trump’s immigration and border security agenda.
According to the survey conducted earlier this month, 53 percent of Kamala Harris voters say they support a tougher approach to illegal immigration, along with 87 percent of Donald Trump voters. Overall, 68 percent of respondents said the federal government should take a more hardline stance, up from 62 percent in the same poll back in July 2023.
63 percent of respondents also answered “yes” when asked if the federal government had lost control of the border, while only 27 percent said no. Roughly half of Harris voters agreed the border was out of control.
Earlier this year, another poll from Gallup found that 55 percent of Americans want to see a reduction in all immigration – not just illegal immigration. That figure is the highest Gallup has measured since 2001 and the first time since 2005 that a majority of the country has supported lower legal immigration. Just 16 percent of respondents said they wanted to see an increase in immigration.
Notably, just 26 percent of Democrats said they wanted to see more immigration, while 28 percent said they wanted to see less, and 41 percent said they wanted immigration levels to remain about the same. Among Independents, those numbers were 17, 50, and 27 percent, respectively.
Given these results, it’s no surprise that Kamala Harris has radically shifted her rhetoric on immigration. During her 2020 campaign, she was one of the strongest proponents of open borders in the race, calling for healthcare for illegal aliens and suggesting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be entirely abolished.
Now Harris is promising to get tough on illegal border crossings and prosecute drug cartels and human traffickers. During a recent CNN Townhall, Harris even refused to rule out building more sections of the border wall, after calling Trump’s signature border security proposal a “medieval vanity project” in 2019.
Regardless of the outcome on November 5, Trump has clearly already won the debate over immigration and border security. Voters have seen four years of Trump’s immigration policy and four years of Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s immigration policy, and they overwhelmingly want the former – so much so that Harris is now doing her best Trump impersonation on the issue.
But what voters shouldn’t forget is that Harris’s version of “border security” is just the same open borders policies the country has seen over the past four years dressed up in tough-on-illegal-immigration rhetoric.
A case in point of this fact is the supposedly “bipartisan” border bill that Harris loves to reference on the campaign trail. That measure, introduced in February of this year, died in committee following urgent warnings from former President Donald Trump and conservative Republicans that it was a Trojan Horse for Democrats’ mass amnesty schemes.
The bill would have cost American taxpayers $118 billion. However, only $20 billion would have been allocated to immigration issues. The overwhelming majority of the money was allocated to foreign aid, including $60 billion to Ukraine, an additional $14 billion for Israel, $10 billion for humanitarian assistance in Gaza, and $2 billion in welfare for illegal immigrants, as well as various other funding that had no relation to the border.
Moreover, much of the funding designated as “border security” would in fact be used to process illegal aliens and release them into the United States. The bill would have codified catch-and-release of migrants and mandated that the United States accept 5,000 illegal aliens per day – or 1.8 million per year.
As several Republican lawmakers noted when the bill was introduced, the legislation would have significantly expanded the president’s authority to quickly grant asylum claims, allowing a Democrat White House to claim that it has “solved” the border crisis merely by declaring that everyone who crossed the border illegally is now here legally.
Further, while the bill does call for building a border wall, no direct money is allocated. Instead, funding for the wall would come from whatever “unallocated funds” remain from other provisions.
A few Senate Republicans, even some who have reputations for being principled conservatives, fell for the ploy and backed the bill, allowing Harris and the media to claim the effort was “bipartisan.” But the reality – as both polls mentioned above show – is that a bipartisan majority of the American people are against the provisions of that legislation.
Nonetheless, Harris has made promises to revive and pass this disastrous bill a central theme of her immigration agenda. If that’s her idea of “tough on immigration,” voters can expect four more years of record illegal crossings, mass crime, and chaos in American communities.
The country has just a few days to wait to see if Harris’s cynical ploy to masquerade as a border hawk will pay off.
Andrew Shirley is a veteran speechwriter and AMAC Newsline columnist. His commentary can be found on X at @AA_Shirley.
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