Yahoo Finance Why Biden needs a 'border wall'
Heading into the fourth year of his presidency, Joe Biden sees new urgency to make a big move on immigration.
For one thing, Congressional Republicans demand action on the massive flows of migrants at the southern border as a condition of approving new aid for Ukraine, which is a top Biden priority. Biden appears open to that, and has reportedly gotten involved in negotiations himself.
Immigration is also one of Biden’s weakest issues. His approval rating on immigration is just 34%, lower than his overall 40% approval rating. Voters rate immigration a top-five issue, and the moderate swing voters Biden needs to win reelection next year care more about it than Democrats likely to vote for Biden no matter what. So building credibility on immigration could be crucial to Biden’s reelection effort.
Yet Biden seems likely to face the same problem on immigration that he faces on the economy: voters reluctant to give him credit, even if things improve.
Biden’s approval rating on the economy, at 37%, is barely better than his immigration rating. It should be considerably higher. Job growth under Biden is the strongest under any president ever, and the unemployment rate is a super low 3.7%. Inflation is obviously a problem, but it has dropped sharply to a manageable 3.2%. Gas prices, the unofficial measure of American well-being, are in the comfort zone, at $3.15 per gallon.
Yet Biden gets no love from voters.
That could change if inflation continues to decline, yet Biden’s weak standing on the economy reveals a notable deficiency that may weaken him on other issues: He lacks crisp branding.
What does Joe Biden stand for?
He’s liberal but not a leftist like Bernie Sanders. He’s a late-blooming populist rolling out government programs for everybody, yet as a lifelong politician he’s also a traditionalist and an establishmentarian. He’s Union Joe, yet an elite whose son has been able to earn millions on the family name and not much else.
Drop Rick Newman a note, follow him on Twitter, or sign up for his newsletter.
Biden tried some branding on his economic plan. Earlier this year, he embraced the “Bidenomics” label Yahoo Finance and other media outlets use to describe his “all of government” policies for subsidizing green energy, semiconductors, and other favored industries and rebuilding American supply chains. Nothing changed. Biden’s approval rating remained depressed, and Biden has since backed away from the term.
Biden could be excused if he borrowed from President Donald Trump’s playbook.
Nobody should emulate Trump’s dishonesty, his authoritarian tendencies, his vulgarity, or his contempt for legalities. But Trump is a marketing genius whose flair for branding helped him get elected against all odds in 2016, and could help him beat Biden in 2024 despite two impeachments, 91 pending criminal charges, and a string of never-ending controversies.
Trump’s umbrella slogan, of course, is “Make America Great Again.” That has wondrous elasticity because it allows voters to imagine Trump will return the country to whatever state each individual considers to have been the glory days, whether it was 1955, 1988, or something else.
The principle of “America First” drives Trump’s economic policies. As president, he imposed tariffs on imports and renegotiated the trade deal with Mexico and Canada to put the United States in a more advantaged position. A lot of it was hooey. The Trump tariffs added to Americans’ costs and lowered growth. But Trump’s insistence to the contrary persuaded a lot of people and created room for him to carry out misguided policy that otherwise might have been ruinous for him.
On immigration, Trump’s brand was the border wall. Keep everybody out. This, too, masked reality, as border crossings ticked up during Trump’s second year in office, then surged in 2019 — as construction of Trump’s wall was actually underway. Do voters remember that illegal crossings went up under Trump? Nope. Even now, voters rate Trump ahead of Biden on immigration by 23 points, and Republicans ahead of Democrats on the issue by 30 points.
To be fair to Biden, his plan was to enforce immigration laws more gently than Trump. Biden has also had to deal with a post-COVID boom in migration and the end of COVID-era emergency measures that led to automatic expulsion for about half of all migrants crossing the southwest border for three years, starting in 2020. Yet the crush of newcomers has gotten so intense that even Democratic governors and mayors have begun to plead with Biden for help.
So what could Biden do? Republicans want to make it harder for migrants to claim asylum status, and Biden could go along with that. He’s also asking for more money to address a shortfall of staffing and facilities and shorten a long backlog for hearings, approval of work permits, and other matters.
What Biden may really need, however, is his own “border wall”: a simple symbol that conveys his determination to fix the problem. It’s a tough challenge. Biden’s whole approach to immigration is one of nuance: Treat it as foreign policy matter attributable to the root cause of failing governments in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and other places where the migrants come from.
How do you brand that, without evoking Trump’s meanness? A “get in line” campaign? “Wait your turn?” “We’ll call you when there’s an opening?”
Even if there is a deal to fix the problems, it’s hard to foresee voters crediting Biden with any improvements. On the economy, Biden speaks frequently, ticking off one success after another on job gains, factory openings, new union contracts. It never seems to penetrate the gloomy narrative of an economy strangled by inflation. If six months from now Biden could brag about a sharp decline in border encounters and a new and improved immigration system, voters getting their information from cable news or social media would still probably worry about an “open border.”
Moving public opinion on contentious issues is a dark art that Biden, for better or worse, doesn’t practice.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
Click here for politics news related to business and money
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
