CBS White House Reporter: Democrats Need Migration Bill for 2022 Midterm Election

Democrats will lose the 2022 midterm election unless they try harder to pass immigration legislation, CBS’ top political reporter Ed O’Keefe claimed on December 26.

“The problem for Democrats going into next year is if they expect to be able to turn out the kinds of people that they need to win congressional elections and governors’ elections in the west, especially, they have to show serious commitment to having tried,” O’Keefe told CBS’s Face the Nation TV show.

“Political analysis is not this guy’s strong point,” responded Mark Kirkorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. He continued:

The idea that Biden’s going to suffer electorally unless he makes even more dramatic moves to weaken the border is ludicrous. Immigration is a losing issue for Democrats and had he done more, he’d been even deeper kimchi than he is now … It’s bananas frankly. I think he should probably get into a different line of work.

Already, Biden’s ratings have been battered by his apparent unwillingness to control the border. Moreover, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) knows his party lose five Senate seats in 2014 after trying to push the “Gang of Eight” amnesty in 2013.

In his December 26 appearance on CBS’ Sunday show, O’Keefe echoed the establishment’s false and self-serving narrative that migration is a gain for the United States:

The most underreported and under-discussed issue in this town is immigration. There has been a real failure to act for too long, and it continued this year, [amid] certainly plenty of urgent priorities that had to be addressed, whether it’s the economic recovery, the ongoing fight with the pandemic. Now, of course, things like inflation and just keeping this country together, frankly.

But one of the things that just undergirds everything about this country, the economy, job creation, the fight over illegal drugs, schooling, you know, and yeah, national identity and security, is this issue that for too long — this entire century — presidents have said they would try to tackle and they just have not.

There were some modest attempts made in this debate over Build Back Better to see if they could tuck something into an already big bill. I think most of those involved knew that that was not going to happen, but they had to at least appear as if they were trying.

But the problem for Democrats going into next year is if they expect to be able to turn out the kinds of people that they need to win congressional elections and governors elections in the west, especially, they have to show serious commitment to having tried.

This happened to them in 2014, and they failed and they’ve tried it again … and they claim they’re going to try again.

But absent presidential leadership — and this is an issue he seems allergic to discussing when he gets asked about it or when he’s confronted with it — it’s going to be a problem for this country that just persists for too long.

Business advocates are pushing the same line:

O’Keefe’s views are “just the accepted wisdom among liberal whites in the Acela Corridor, Ivy League folks, and it’s just another indication of how clueless they are about what’s actually going on in the country,” Krikorian said.

Most — but not all — liberals impose their identity politics perspective on Latinos, and so they insist that Latinos favor more migration, Krikorian said.

“Identity politics is a real thing — but it is only one thing” of many factors, Krikorian countered:

Many voters do think in identity terms — to a degree — when considering who to support. But it’s not the only thing they’re thinking about. There are all kinds of other concerns like bread and butter economic issues, and like other kinds of cultural issues —  firmness against crime, support for new normal social relationships. There’s a lot of things that voters consider, and reducing black and Hispanic voters to identity bots, is not just insulting, but it’s just wrong, it’s factually incorrect.

The nuanced view is echoed by Mike Madrid, a California-based GOP strategist prominent in the NeverTrump movement.

Excluding California, “what you see is a big, big shift towards the Republican Party,” Madrid said in a recent podcast. “It’s not small … if you take out the [California numbers] we’re probably not that far from parity between the two parties.”

The shift towards the GOP is fueled by the Democrats’ collective hostility to middle-class industries and jobs, he suggested:

There’s plenty of data to suggest that the real problem here is a policy problem: The Democrats are increasingly a party that is having trouble with working-class Americans, because of a lot of the issues that they champion. They are viewed as the enemy of a lot of industries that provide for an $80,000 to $100,000-a-year job working in energy, working in the construction trades, working in all of these industries … It’s really that simple: “It’s the economy, stupid,” right?

“One of the reasons why the Democratic Party is having such difficulty right now with the Hispanic vote is because it views non-white progressives as an aggrieved racial minority,  it views the Hispanic voter as a black voter [but] they’re not even close,” he added.

The left-wing Equis Research group reported December 13 that almost 51 percent of Latinos want to rollback asylum migration, and 45 percent want to reduce legal immigration:

O’Keefe is also wrong about black voters attitudes towards migration, Krikorian said:

Black voters haven’t really been mobilized as immigration restriction is forced politically, but there’s no way that expanding immigration or weakening enforcement is going to increase black turnout for Democrats. And it doesn’t even look like it’s all that important to Hispanic voters. I mean, Donald Trump — of all people — increased his Hispanic share of the vote and for Republicans in general.

Many polls show that Americans want to like immigrants and immigration. But the bipartisan federal government has exploited that openness since 1990 to extract tens of millions of migrants from poor countries to serve U.S. businesses as workers, consumers, and renters.

That economic strategy damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and also raises their rents.

The strategy also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.

A wide variety of little-publicized polls has shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based,  bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.