Stacey Matthews at Legal Insurrection (better known as Sister Toldjah) reported CNN hosts are alarmed enough about Joe Biden’s approval rating on immigration that they had to sound the alarm, and admit the Republicans are winning the opinion battle on the border crisis. That’s a crisis at CNN, when Democrats are in danger of losing.
After a report by Rosa Flores on the ground in Eagle Pass, Texas on Thursday's Inside Politics, host Dana Bash warned about polls showing Joe Biden's approval ratings, especially on immigration:
BASH: Look let's just sort of put in context, the politics of this for President Biden, and how important it is. Just one example from a Monmouth approval rating poll, question. You look at the issues, and how he fares -- infrastructure, jobs, climate change, inflation. Immigration, he is now 26 percent. That is not good.
SEUNG MIN KIM, AP: It's not good at all. And I think that part of the trip yesterday to Mexico, by senior Biden Administration officials, was obviously to have these diplomatic conversations, but also to make the broader administration's point that this is a regional issue that requires regional cooperation, and sort of trying to blunt the criticism from Republicans that you're hearing over and over, saying that these were Biden's border policy that's causing these numbers at the border.
But that certainly doesn't change the fact that he's under considerable political pressure over immigration, and that his administration is probably preparing to make some significant compromises on immigration next month.
Bash then added that the Republicans are upset about all the illegal immigration, but she noted big-city Democrat mayors are, too. After clips of their complaints, Kasie Hunt broke it down:
KASIE HUNT: That right there is the problem that Joe Biden has right, in a nutshell, because it is no longer -- you know, for a long time, this conversation was these, you know, red state mayors and governors are being alarmist. And, you know, we have to be - that we have to focus on the humanitarian issue here. Obviously, the U.S. has a humanitarian responsibility to you know, it's written into the law into our asylum laws. But this crisis has gotten worse, not better.
And, frankly, the strategy that these red state governors have had of sending a lot of these migrants up to blue states has worked from a political perspective. And it is very, very hard for these cities to absorb them.
Hunt added that Team Biden wouldn’t be willing to make concessions toward more border control if the crisis wasn’t this bad, but then she tried to turn it around and suggest Republicans are cynical, maybe they prefer “this continue to be a problem for them in the 2024 election.”
Bash then repeated Biden spin, that it’s “important to point out” that attempts an immigration “reform” legislation have been “fruitless for almost two decades,” so Biden’s president, sure, but this is a “problem that has not been fixed for so long.”
Then Tia Mitchell of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution blamed Trump, “who made fixing immigration a central part of his campaign message, and then did very little about it beyond some segments of border wall.”
This ignores how much Democrats resist any attempts at border control, that the Biden team has aggressively battled against Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempts to have some border control in Texas.
