Immigration Reformed?
Opinion by Ben Everidge for Thomas
Fixing America’s illegal immigration crisis…
It is shaping to be one of the most pressing issues in the 2024 presidential campaign between incumbent Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. Who will be perceived to do a better job controlling the US-Mexico border and reforming a very broken immigration system may very well determine who the next President of the United States is on January 20th, 2025.
An NBC News poll this week found that Americans currently prefer Donald J Trump, the former 45th President, to Joseph R. Biden, the current 46th President, on border and immigration issues, 57 percent to 22 percent. On the other hand, Republican members of the United States Senate and U.S. House of Representatives just inartfully killed a serious bipartisan effort to fix at least a good part of what is causing the current border crisis. The start of a fix anyway.
Trump campaigned in 2016 and again in 2020 that he would fix America’s crisis at the Mexico border. Trump said just recently that he alone can resolve the immigration crisis once he is elected in 2024 and browbeat Republican legislators to kill the immigration fix. This legislative initiative appears to have been among the strongest in recent memory.
The critical electoral college battleground states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York have between them some 500,000 up to two million illegals each. Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington have more than a fair amount themselves, proving what a national problem illegal immigration is in the United States.
With both major party candidates being so unpopular with the American public overall and the existence of three non-major party candidates running as well, political independents will undeniably be critical to a winning election formula in 2024.
