Estb. Media: Migration Is Top Kamala Harris Vulnerability

President Joe Biden’s mass migration policy is the “biggest current weakness” for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign chances, according to Politico.

One fix, according to Politico, would be her selection of Sen. Mark Kelly {D-AZ) as her running mate.

“A growing number of House Democrats are telling Kamala Harris that she should pick Sen. Mark Kelly as her vice president, believing he would offset her biggest current weakness: the border,” Politico wrote on July 28:

Hailing from a battleground and border state, Kelly backs improved security and voted in favor of the Senate’s bipartisan border deal earlier this year. Five days before President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy, Kelly was in Mexico City meeting with that nation’s president and pushed him on security and management of their shared border. [Rep. Lou] Correa [D-Ca], who had joined Kelly on the trip, recalled thinking of the Arizona senator: “Wow, man, this guy knows what he’s talking about.”

Karen Tumulty, an associate editor at the Washington Post, pushed the same line, “Picking Kelly, who at 60 is roughly the same age as Harris, would help inoculate her in areas where she is likely to be vulnerable. That starts with immigration.”

Chris Chmielewski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, scoffed at the possible promotion for Kelly.

Harris has had more involvement in immigration than Kelly because of Vice Presidential status and because of her seat on the Senate’s judiciary committee, he told Breitbart News:

[Before 2021] she did sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had jurisdiction over immigration policy. She comes from a state that is somewhat central to the nation’s immigration policy of the last 30 years … She’s hearing from [donors in] Silicon Valley, and I’m sure they’re telling her “Listen, we can’t find computer programmers, we need more, we need to bring in more people.'”

“Instead, she’s going to go to somebody who has a military background and was an astronaut? …  It just doesn’t make sense that you bill him as your immigration expert on the [2024] ticket,” Chmielewski said.

But Kelly is a safe pick for her because he “tends to toe the company line,’ Chmielewski said:

The party line [is] “We need to secure the southern border, but we also need to [comprehensive immigration reform] …. He’s definitely somebody who would be supportive of the open-borders idea of comprehensive immigration reform, which would be amnesty for millions of illegal aliens and exponential increases in legal immigration.

But Kelly has played little role in setting national immigration policy in the Senate, Chmielewski told Breitbart News:

If you go back and you look at this [2024] working group that Senator [Chuck] Schumer [D-NY] put together essentially to try to address the border crisis legislatively, he didn’t pick Mark Kelly for it. He picked [Kyrsten] Sinema [D-AZ] who was an independent and he had [Sen.] Chris Murphy [D-CN] on it. I cannot think of one single example where he has been intimately involved in addressing immigration policy here in the United States, outside of the coincidence that he happens to live in a state that has a tremendous amount of illegal border crossings under the Biden administration’s watch.

[His perspective on immigration is] more from a business perspective. So the wait times at the border are [important for him] because so much trade goes in and out across the land borders, mainly through trucks, and you also have a lot of a lot of folks in Mexico who cross over to Arizona to go shop on a Sam’s Club or something. Obviously that’s a boost to the Arizona community. It’s more from building the local economy, not from an immigration policy perspective, or addressing the entire federal immigration system as a whole.

Since 2021, Harris has repeatedly kept her distance from Biden’s very unpopular migration policy, which is run by his Cuban-born, pro-migration border chief, Alejandro Mayorkas.

In March 2021, Biden tasked her with a wide range of border duties, prompting many media outlets – including CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and ABC — to describe her as a “border czar.”  (This month when that moniker appeared to hurt Harris’s chances in the presidential race, those same outlets announced that “border czar” was never her title.”).

Biden said:

I’ve asked her, the VP, today—because she’s the most qualified person to do it—to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle and the countries that help—are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border … When she speaks, she speaks for me. Doesn’t have to check with me. She knows what she’s doing, and I hope we can move this along.

“The Vice President has agreed … to lead our diplomatic effort and work with those nations to accept the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders,” Biden told the cameras he invited for the occasion.

Notably, Harris responded to Biden’s “stemming” order by saying the U.S. government “must address the root causes” of migration:

 Well, thank you, Mr. President and for having the confidence in me. And there’s no question that this is a challenging situation … And while we are clear that people should not come to the border now, we also understand that we will enforce the law and that we also—because we can chew gum and walk at the same time—must address the root causes that cause people to make the trek, as the President has described, to come here.

President Biden did not use the “root cause” term.

A few months later, in June 2021, she echoed Mayorkas’ policy: “The President and I are absolutely committed to ensuring that our immigration system is orderly and humane, and I do believe that we are making progress in that regard.”

Since 2021, Mayorkas welcomed roughly 10 million legal and illegal migrants. The inflow adds up to roughly one migrant for every American birth. That vast population hurts ordinary Americans by dragging down wages, diverting business investment from workplace productivity, and pushing up both housing prices and mortgage rates.

Picking Kelly as her immigration chief would be unlikely to help stem migration, Chmielewski noted.

But that is what her supporters are pushing.

The two issues of guns and the border “are likely to be Harris’ biggest political weaknesses on the campaign trail, given her challenges carrying out the vaguely defined job Biden gave her to address the “root causes” of illegal migration,” wrote Bloomberg op-ed writer Erika Smith.  “For this, Republicans have branded Harris a “failed border czar,” and they are working hard to make it stick. Kelly would upend that narrative.”

RELATED: People Greet “Take Our Border Back” Convoy as It Passes Through Brookshire, TX

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“Mr. Kelly’s special appeal, beyond what other potential running mates from swing states could provide, is his expertise on the technical issues and politics of the U.S.-Mexico border, perhaps Ms. Harris’s biggest vulnerability, his backers say,”  the New York Times said on July 26, adding:

Mr. Kelly’s approach to the border embraces barriers like Mr. Trump’s wall in some places, though not across the entire frontier. He has also called for an immigration policy that treats migrants with respect and maintains asylum options.

“Mark is in a great position to expose that, say, ‘Look, I represent the border state down there. I’m very aware of what’s going on,’” Democratic strategist Adam Kinsey told TheHill.com. “It gives Democrats sort of a way to really have somebody who’s an expert on the situation speak authoritatively.”