Joe Biden is finding it increasingly difficult to hold his anti-Trump coalition together. This is not only due to his advanced age of 81, which three quarters of eligible voters see as a problem. Rather, the US President is struggling to serve the opposing interests in his ragtag electoral alliance. Only a third of those eligible to vote still agree with how much Biden supports Israel in the Gaza war. Young and Muslim Americans in particular are turning away from him because of this.
Now, in the days before Christmas, other important groups are threatening to withdraw their support for Biden. The US President has antagonized Delia Ramirez, a Democratic representative from Michigan, one of the old industrial states in the Rust Belt, which Biden won in 2020 with a lead of just 154,188 votes over Trump. She said she couldn’t campaign for a candidate who didn’t support migrants’ rights, she told CNN on Monday.
According to the New York Times, an “earthquake”
Biden, however, is currently preparing to do the opposite. On his first day as president, he sent Congress a migration reform bill to “bring humanity and American values back to our immigration system.” Instead of expanding legal access to asylum and easing the conditions, as he had suggested at the time, Biden is now preparing to tighten migration policy, which is reflected in the ruling New York Times is equivalent to an “earthquake”.
The Republicans have been pushing for this for months in vain, but they currently have a pawn with which they want to make Biden compliant. They are refusing to approve a $112 billion funding package that includes aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. They only want to agree if the Democrats add a reform of migration policy according to Republican taste to the package.
The president says he is ready to make “significant concessions.”
After much hesitation, Biden recently instructed his people to negotiate a compromise with Republicans at the Capitol. He said he was prepared to make “significant concessions.” Among other things, he is prepared to tighten the criteria with which the authorities assess whether a migrant is threatened with life and limb in the country of origin. In addition, officials should be able to send migrants back to Mexico more easily at the border.
The talks are going slowly, although time is of the essence: Ukraine depends on further transfers from the USA in order to be able to continue to resist Russia’s attack. “There is no way” a solution will be ready before the holidays, said Republican John Thune, one of their leaders in the Senate.
“At least Trump is honest about the fact that he hates migrants.”
Still, progressives are already fuming. The Democratic Latino representatives in Congress demanded a discussion with the White House; However, Biden’s chief of staff Jeff Zients failed to calm the angry tempers on Saturday. Progressives are also expressing anger on social media. The journalist Pablo Manríquez, who specializes in migration, wrote: “I honestly can’t imagine why anyone would vote for Joe Biden. Trump is at least honest about the fact that he hates migrants.”
Donald Trump has used Nazi rhetoric several times during campaign events in recent days. Among other things, he said: “Immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country,” a reference to Adolf Hitler’s incitement against Jews and dissidents. However, Trump’s numerous Hitler quotes in recent weeks are not hurting him in the polls. In the favor of those surveyed, he is currently leading against Joe Biden, whose ratings reached a low in December: just under 37 percent are satisfied with his administration. His migration figures have slipped significantly. Only 38 percent of voters say they agree with how Biden is handling the dossier.
However, Biden is by no means only criticized from the left. Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, for example, who cultivates a working-class image with his uniform of shorts and hoodie, broke with the progressives in his party last week. It is “sensible” to talk about protecting the southern border. In September, authorities stopped more than 270,000 migrants there, a record number. “That’s the size of Pittsburgh, the second largest city in Pennsylvania,” Fetterman said, without explicitly saying he thought that number was too high.
The number of migrants stopped fell to just under 200,000 in October and November. But even with this, the American authorities are overwhelmed, not only in the border states, but also in the democratically governed cities in the north, the destination of many migrants. Tightening asylum policy is therefore increasingly popular among moderate democratic and independent voters. By tightening migration policy, Biden is taking these concerns into account; In return, he is losing activists on the left, on whom he will urgently depend in the presidential campaign. Barack Obama also performed a similar balancing act, deporting significantly more migrants than his predecessor George W. Bush. However, Obama started his re-election with less miserable results than Biden, and he also had more early praise from progressive and African-American voters – and he was not 81 years old.
In any case, it is clear that migration will be one of the defining issues of the 2024 election campaign. The Republicans are working hard on this, including in Texas. On Monday, Governor Greg Abbott, who had already installed barbed wire and buoy barriers, signed a new law. It allows local police forces to jail migrants and Texas judges to deport them. This competence is actually reserved for the federal authorities, and a long legal battle is inevitable.