Americans’ rising opposition to migration will be “tragic” if it deters politicians from importing yet more foreign workers, Fox News’ chief political correspondent Brit Hume said Wednesday.
Hume was asked by Fox News host Bret Baier about a new Gallup poll that shows rising public opposition to legal and illegal immigration.
“This has the potential, Bret, to be really quite tragic,” lamented Hume, who then made the establishment case for continued mass immigrati0n:
Immigrants and their descendants have made an enormous contribution to this country. We need them to continue to be able to do that. We need legal immigrants to be able to continue to come and bring their skills and talents — their mere ability to get here is a sign of potential.
Hume blamed the rising public opposition to legal immigration on the inflow of illegal migrants who have been invited by President Joe Biden and his progressive deputies:
But the illegal immigration on the scale that we’ve seen, the absolutely porous southern border … has soured people on immigration, and it shows up perfectly in the poll numbers that you just showed.
So at a time when the economy needs to grow, the labor force is tight, and you’re going to need workers for the economy to come, this is a negative development when people feel this way babout [illegal] immigration because it’ll restrict the willingness of both parties to support legal immigration.
But opposition is rising as more Americans recognize the pocketbook damage caused by the federal government’s 33-year-old economic policy of mass immigration. That policy extracts wage-cutting workers and taxpayer-aided consumers, and shared-occupancy renters from poor countries, and uses them to boost U.S. investors and employers and advertising companies.
The Extraction Migration policy was temporarily blocked by President Donald Trump’s curbs on migration. Those curbs helped tighten the labor market and so boosted wages for ordinary Americans.
But since Trump’s success, many polls have shown rising Americans’ opposition to both legal and illegal migration, and multiple establishment media outlets have admitted the trend.
In January, 49 percent of Americans favored a decrease in government-managed legal immigration, while 43 percent favor an increase, according to a FoxNews poll of 1,003 registered voters.
By a factor of more than two to one, Americans agree companies “should raise wages and try harder to recruit Americans even if it causes the prices of their products to rise,” said a July 20-22 poll by YouGov.com.
Just 28 percent of registered voters believe immigration has been positive for their local economy, according to an August 12-15 survey of 2,025 registered voters conducted for a pro-migration advocacy group. Only 38 percent say immigration is good for the United States, the poll added.
Thirty-five percent of the respondents in a 2022 poll by YouGov said immigration makes the United States “worse off.” Thirty-one percent said immigration makes the U.S. “Better off,” according to the poll of 1,500 citizens.
Hume, however, claimed that migration is good for the overall economy — regardless of how it moves money from young people, workers, and central states toward investors in New York and other coastal cities.
His views match the views of Rupert Murdoch, who is Hume’s employer at Fox News. In 2014, Murdoch championed passage of the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and cheap labor bill in an op-ed in his Wall Street Journal newspaper:
People are looking for leadership—those who stand for something and offer a vision for how to take America forward and keep our nation economically competitive. One of the most immediate ways to revitalize our economy is by passing immigration reform.
…
We need to give those individuals who are already here—after they have passed checks to ensure they are not dangerous criminals—a path to citizenship so they can pay their full taxes, be counted, and become more productive members of our community.
Next, we need to do away with the cap on H-1B visas, which is arbitrary and results in U.S. companies struggling to find the high-skill workers they need to continue growing. We already know that most of the applications for these visas are for computer programmers and engineers, where there is a shortage of qualified American candidates. But we are held back by the objections of the richly funded labor unions that mistakenly believe that if we keep innovation out of America, somehow nothing will change. They are wrong, and frankly as much to blame for our stalemate on this issue as nativists who scream about amnesty.
During the Gang of Eight debate, Murdoch’s TV channels focused almost entirely on the chaos of illegal migration, and rarely mentioned the huge economic damage caused by migration since 1990. That skewed policy at Fox News continues into 2023 as producers spotlight border chaos and downplay the economic pain of migration.
On February 15, Hume hit many of the same points as Murdoch cited in 2014:
I think immigration — illegal immigration, I’m talking about here — and crime and some other issues are kind of a time bomb that didn’t quite go off in 2022. But they’re still out there. And if public dissatisfaction with immigration — because of illegal immigration — continues to build, it will certainly be an issue in the 2024 race and it’ll be difficult for any Republican candidate — given the [pro-American] sentiment in the Republican Party — to support continued [immigration] or [to] reform immigration, which the two parties have seemed paralyzed about for a long time.
So the situation could become even more divisive and even worse, as we move forward.
Hume even backed the 1950s narrative that the United States is a “Nation of Immigrants,” saying “We are, as has been said a million times, a nation of immigrants.”
However, just 26 percent of people “strongly” endorse the 1950s “Nation of Immigrants” narrative, down from 40 percent in 2018, said an August 2022 poll by Ipsos.
In contrast, a majority of Americans say President Joe Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to a July 2022 poll commissioned by the left-of-center, taxpayer-supported National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “Invasion” majority includes 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
Despite the polls showing the pocketbook concerns about migration, GOP leaders have downplayed the pocketbook damage of legal and illegal migration, largely because of donor pressure.
Instead, they focus their rhetoric and draft bills on the non-pocketbook migration issues — illegal migration, border chaos, and drugs — and hide the economic impact of migration that is visible from California to New York.
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