Poll: Many Latinos Oppose Biden’s Border Policy

Latinos are just as likely to oppose as to support President Joe Biden’s easy migration policy, while the nation’s swing voting independents oppose it by 2:1, according to a poll commissioned by the NPR media network.

The poll asked 1,309 adults if they “approve or disapprove of how President Biden is handling immigration.”

Overall, just 33 percent of voters approve of Biden’s border policies, while 54 percent disapprove, says the Marist poll, conducted March 22 to 25, which matches other polling results.

Just 27 percent of the swing voting, election-deciding independents approve of Biden’s policies, while 53 percent said they disapprove. The number will likely get worse for Biden because 21 percent of independents said they were still “unsure.”

Latinos split 43 percent approve, 43 percent disapprove — and 15 percent unsure what to choose, the poll showed.

The Latino opposition is not surprising to GOP Rep. John Hostettler, who runs state policy campaigns for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. In 2020, “we saw a significant change in [2020 in] several [Latino-dominated] border counties going for Trump,” he said, adding that the Latino shift will expand as Biden releases more migrants into more states and counties further from the border.

“The support for Joe Biden’s [pro-]immigration and border security policies are probably directly proportional to the distance from the [Mexican] border,” he said.

A March 22 Washington Post article spotlighted Democratic alarm over Latinos’ 2020 movement towards President Donald Trump’s populist GOP:

To many progressives, the trend was a shock — how could a president who so brazenly denigrated Latinos and immigrants actually increase his stock among those same voters? — but it was also a wake-up call. For a generation, Democrats have taken comfort in the assumption that long-term demographics were on their side: As America became less and less White, Democrats would enjoy an increasing advantage in national politics. The growing Latino vote was a — maybe the — linchpin of this thinking. Which means that if, in fact, Latinos are drifting from Democrats, it constitutes an emergency for the party, one that could haunt them in 2022, 2024 and beyond.

Other studies show that the vast majority of Latinos prefer to be seen as normal Americans, not as a resentful, ethnic identity Latino minority.

Overall, just eight weeks into his tenure, Biden’s immigration policies have a lower approval rating than President Donald had in his second year, says the poll. The poll showed 34 percent approval for Biden, compared to 38 percent approval for Trump, even though Biden is getting very favorable coverage from the establishment media, which consistently and constantly hammered Trump’s policies.

The Marist poll showed near-universal opposition to Biden’s policy among GOP voters — Republicans split five percent approve, 89 percent disapprove.

However,  Democrats split, with just 66 percent approval, 23 percent disapproval, and 11 percent unsure. The Democratic split means that Biden can lose more support from his own party as his deputies import more migrants.

Biden got his highest rating among college-educated white women. They gave Biden’s border policy 49 percent approval and 39 percent disapproval.

In contrast, white male college graduates opposed Biden with 26 percent approval to 64 percent disapproval.

Those Marist numbers show a huge 48-point gap between the male and female white college voters. One potential cause for the gap is that fewer white college graduates recognize the displacement caused by the inflow of foreign graduates into U.S. jobs. Male and female white college graduates each comprise 13 percent of the voting population.

A report by Campus Reform illustrated attitudes among female students and the possibility of further shifts against Biden:

Respondents living in a “big city” backed Biden 44 percent to 39 percent — but support slid down to 32 percent approval in suburbia and just 21 percent approval in rural areas.

For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad American opposition to legal migration, labor migration, and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.

The multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, intra-Democrat, and solidarity-themed opposition to labor migration coexists with generally favorable personal feelings toward legal immigrants and toward immigration in theory — despite the media magnification of many skewed polls and articles still pushing the 1950s corporate “Nation of Immigrants” claim.