Biden Rolls Out Newly Aggressive Border Messaging

President Joe Biden is beta testing a new message on the campaign trail and in the White House.

“If you believe, as I do, that we must secure the border now, doing nothing is not an option,” he said Sunday in the wake of a major announcement from a bipartisan coalition of senators who released the text of a bill aimed at shoring up security on the southern border.

The $118 billion legislative package amounts to the most comprehensive immigration reform Congress has embarked on in decades – a painstakingly negotiated bill that couples Republican national security and border concerns with emergency aid for Ukraine and Israel that Democrats are seeking, among other things.

Republicans in the Senate, where the negotiations took place and where the bill may come up for a procedural vote on Wednesday, have hailed the emerging agreement as a historic opportunity for the GOP to enact long-sought conservative policies to address migrants streaming into the U.S. from the southern border.

But former President Donald Trump, whose entire campaign is shaping up to be a referendum on the border, is attempting to scuttle the deal, pressuring House Republicans to refuse anything other than a package of hard-line GOP policy priorities.

Biden’s response: Send the immigration bill to my desk to sign and I’ll shut down the border right now.

“If that bill were the law today, I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly,” he told a crowd of supporters in South Carolina last week.

The newly aggressive messaging is likely a necessary tone for an issue that’s overtaken the economy as the No. 1 concern among voters.

“It’s pretty clear that this is a major area of vulnerability for President Biden because large numbers of voters in surveys around the country as well as in exit polls from the primaries that we’ve seen so far identify immigration and border security as a core issue for them,” says Matthew Wilson, professor of political science at Southern Methodist University.

Indeed, Trump glided to victory in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary with the help of Republicans who said their biggest concern is immigration. In Iowa, about 9 in 10 backed building a border wall, and three-quarters said immigrants do more to hurt than help the United States, according to AP VoteCast. And among those in New Hampshire who named immigration as their top priority, about three-quarters supported Trump.

“Obviously Biden regards that as very problematic,” Wilson says. “That’s why I think you’re seeing a renewed focus on this. That’s why you’re seeing him try to talk and act tougher about border security. But it’s also why Trump really wants to focus on this as a core issue in the fall campaigns because it’s one where he thinks he has a major advantage over Biden.”

The deal reached Sunday would raise the threshold for migrants to receive asylum status, automatically shut down the southern border to migrants if crossings hit certain counts per day and provide billions in aid to Ukraine, Israel and for U.S. border security.

The core of the legislation will address how to slow the growing number of people who seek asylum from racial, religious or political persecution. But the system has become overwhelmed, resulting in years-long waits for cases to be heard. And once they’re heard, an increasing number of migrants are failing to prove their asylum status – if they show up for their hearing at all.

According to the Border Patrol’s most recent figures, migrant encounters in December totaled 302,034, topping 300,000 for the first time and shattering the previous high of 269,735 in September.

“We cannot have 10,000 people a day coming through the border just let loose wherever they want to go, bussed to wherever these governors send them, with no work permit, no family connection, no ability to settle somewhere,” says Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy, education and politics at Third Way, a center-left think tank in Washington, D.C. that aims to elevate common ground in controversial policy debates.

“We have to fix that. I get that people are very jarred by Biden’s change in language. And I am, too – in a good way. I wish he would have made this change a while ago. Democrats have to admit that this is a real problem.”

The problems seem to be piling up quickly for cities across the country – and by proxy, for Biden.

In Denver, where nearly 40,000 migrants arrived over the past year, city officials have begun limiting the number of days migrants can stay in shelters and pushing them out onto the streets once they hit the cap. Last week in New York City, where approximately 66,900 migrants reside, a group of at least seven was arrested and accused of attacking two New York City Police Department officers outside a migrant shelter.

“That’s not good for anyone,” Erickson says. “That’s why you’re seeing Democrats be willing to do things they weren’t doing in the past. Because if we’re honest, this is unsustainable. It’s not good for the migrants and it’s not good for our country.”

Third Way is message-testing typical Democratic talking points on immigration and border security versus atypical messages that maintain Democratic values but talk about the issue in new and different ways.

“When you lined up the typical Democratic message against the attack, it tanked – no surprise,” Erickson says. “But when you said we’re the party that wants to restore order at the border and we believe we should fix our asylum system so that people can apply under U.S. law and get a decision that is fast, fair and final, we beat the Republican messaging by double digits.”

“So it really is in the Democrats hands about whether they’re going to continue to lose on this or reframe it. I think Biden has started thinking about how to reframe it.”

“Things have reached a level where immigration is going to be one of the top-tier issues in deciding the presidency – and that is unprecedented,” Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. “That has never happened before.”