The Memo: Immigration is on the ballot in Trump-Biden race

The stakes with respect to immigration are as high as they can be in November’s election — and Tuesday’s events showed it.

President Biden announced a new plan that could enable around 500,000 unauthorized migrants, married to U.S. citizens, to gain legal status and ultimately become citizens themselves.

At a White House event announcing the move, first lady Jill Biden empathized with the plight of people in this scenario, whom she characterized as having spent years with the “shadow” of a “missing piece of paper” hanging over them. 

Her husband, she said, was seeking to change that, from a position of “compassion and experience.” 

About an hour later and about 750 miles away in Racine, Wis., former President Trump told supporters that the Biden plan would be “ripped up and thrown out on the first day that we’re back in office.”

The former president insisted that the Biden move, made by executive order, was “illegal as hell.”

“Crooked Joe is sending a message to the world that he rewards illegal entry,” Trump added.

It was a far starker display of difference than had been seen two weeks ago, when Biden announced new restrictions on asylum-seeking at the southwestern border. The shift enables authorities to suspend asylum applications once unauthorized crossings reach a weekly threshold.

The border move was criticized by progressives. But Biden was prodded into making the change by polling that shows immigration is one of his weakest issues in November’s election.

A RealClearPolitics polling average of Biden’s job performance on immigration shows him being met with 60 percent disapproval and only 32 percent approval. 

Biden is eager to cover up that Achilles’s heel with a close election looming. The harbingers are ominous for the center-left. Across the Atlantic, right-wing populists made strong gains in France and Germany during elections to the European Parliament earlier this month, powered in part by public disquiet over migration.

The sheer scale of the differences in approach between Biden and Trump is striking. 

Biden, who often speaks of his ancestral Irish roots, casts immigration as a net benefit to the United States. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre characterized the new measure for the spouses of citizens as being driven by an impulse to “protect … American families and not separate them — and this is an opportunity to do that.”

Trump said last December that immigrants in the country illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a remark that sparked a new firestorm around his rhetoric on the issue.

In an interview with Time magazine published in April, Trump said he would use law enforcement, notably the National Guard, to round up unauthorized migrants for deportation. Trump also said that he “would have no problem using the military per se” for that purpose.

When his interviewer, Eric Cortellessa, noted that it is illegal to deploy the U.S. military against civilians under the terms of the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump insisted, “Well, these aren’t civilians … This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before.”

In the same interview, Trump declined to rule out the construction of new detention camps to house migrants awaiting deportation. “I would not rule out anything. But there wouldn’t be that much of a need for them, because of the fact that we’re going to be moving them out,” he said.

The mention of mass deportations and detention camps sparked outrage on the left and among civil liberties advocates. 

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) earlier this month published a memo outlining its plans to fight Trump’s immigration efforts in the courts, in Congress and at the state and local level if he is reelected. 

The ACLU memo also noted the promise by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, made in a New York Times interview last November, that Trump would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown” in a second term.

The problem for liberals and immigrant-rights advocates is that polls show Trump’s approach is more popular than Biden’s. 

A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll released Thursday found Trump with a 10-point lead when Americans were asked whether they thought the former president or Biden would best handle immigration. It was Trump’s largest advantage on any of the five topics surveyed.

Those sentiments are driven, at least in part, by the sheer number of migrants during the Biden presidency. 

Total encounters between unauthorized migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents at the southwestern border have fallen from February through April. But last December, those encounters peaked at more than 301,000 — or more than 10,000 per day. It was the highest figure ever recorded.

Among conservatives, the theory that immigration is being encouraged by Democrats in the hope of adding new voters to the rolls has become increasingly mainstream — powered in part by Trump, but not by him alone. 

“That’s their game plan. Get as many registered to vote as they can,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Tuesday. “They don’t care about citizens, they don’t care about these people. They’re just looking for voters, and they’re trying do as much as they can before the next election because they’re seeing the writing on the wall.”

Democrats regard such language as nativist scaremongering.

Welcoming Biden’s move on spouses Tuesday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) called it “a step closer to a more compassionate, commonsense immigration system that recognizes the contributions and sacrifices of immigrants who are building their American dream.”

There is precious little common ground on immigration between the two parties — as the collapse of a bipartisan effort earlier this year showed. 

Between Biden and Trump, there is almost none.

Come November, voters will pick which direction they want to go. 

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

Al Weaver contributed reporting.