Immigration will be the most important political issue for Americans in 2024 — except for the current war with nuclear-armed Russia, according to a poll for the Associated Press.
“35% cite immigration and the border wall as a top concern, an increase from 27% last year,” said the December 2023 poll conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Immigration lost the top slot to foreign policy because only 22 percent of Democrats describe it as a top issue.
The issue of “foreign policy” scored higher at 38 percent — just above immigration’s score of 35 percent — because the largely non-partisan issue is very important to both Republicans and Democrats.
President Joe Biden’s migration beat inflation and the economy as top issues. Inflation scored 30 percent and “economy” scored 24 percent, although both are worsened by Biden’s policy of importing many wage-cutting, rent-spiking migrants.
Among Republicans, immigration was the top issue for 55 percent, far ahead of “foreign policy” at 46 percent, inflation at 41 percent, and the economy at 32 percent.
The dominant role of migration in GOP politics leaves little room for GOP legislators to make giveaway migration deals with Biden.
For example, Biden is holding hostage the expected funds for the Ukraine war with Russia because he wants to get congressional funding for more migration during 2024. So far, that ploy has failed, and the establishment GOP has voted against the combined migration and Ukraine funding request.
The rising public concern for foreign policy has likely been caused by Biden’s support for the war against Russia, which crossed the Ukraine-Russian border in 2022 to seize Russian-populated areas in eastern Ukraine, including the Crimean peninsula.
Biden has spent more than $75 billion to stop the Russian move across Ukraine’s borders.
The rising public worry about migration began to take off in 2014, jumped in 2016, and jumped against this year because of Biden’s pro-migration policy.
The national focus on migration was announced on January 2, just as government officials reported news that Biden’s pro-migration border chief welcomed more than 300,000 migrants across the southern border in December 2023.
The record inflow does not include the roughly 50,000 “gotaways” who successfully sneak across the border each month. So Biden’s December 2023 migration was greater than the number of U.S. babies born in December.
Many polls show the public increasingly opposes Biden’s invitation to millions of economic migrants.
In New York, 62 percent of Catholics described legal migration as a burden, and just 27 percent describe it as a benefit, according to an October poll by Siena College for the New York Times.
A majority of Americans say migration is an invasion and the public increasingly rejects the Cold War-era narrative that the United States remains a “Nation of Immigrants.”
