Democrats just shrug about Biden’s border crisis but the numbers don’t lie: Americans Are Less Likely to Support Immigration Reform
Biden campaign event in West Virginia
Democrats are getting in to their ‘resistance’ mode against immigration reform. But they are only talking about issues that are popular with their base.
By Joe Weisenthal
May 17, 2014
In her last appearance as a federal judge in New York, the liberal jurist Michelle Friedland ruled against President Obama’s immigration policy and his use of executive orders. “This is not a constitutional crisis. There is no case before the Court where this type of lawless, unilateral executive action can be justified,” Friedland wrote on May 7 in a decision upholding the denial of citizenship to immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
If a “constitutional crisis” is the best that can be said about the current immigration system, Democrats were right to say that it really was a crisis. But just how serious is the crisis?
To find out, we turned to a new, independent Washington Post-ABC News poll, which found that more and more Americans want to see immigration issues settled at the state and local level, not the federal level.
The Post-ABC poll, taken March 14-20, found that 64 percent of Americans think reform should come from the state and local level and just 22 percent think it should come from the federal level. Just 16 percent want it resolved at both levels.
That means the federal government is losing its influence on what passes as immigration policy in many parts of the country. And it means a Democratic victory in the Senate this fall is just likeliest to produce bipartisan immigration reform that will not be challenged in the Supreme Court.
The Post-ABC poll has other interesting findings, not the least of which is that more and more Americans blame immigrants for the economic problems they are having. According to the pollsters, 57 percent of voters say it is immigrants, not American workers, who are driving down wages:
