Immigration No. 1 issue among voters, explained
By Joe Guzzardi
Syndicated columnist
Analysts can easily explain the reason that immigration has climbed to voters’ top concern. Americans have read the tea leaves and concluded that no matter how profoundly conditions deteriorate in their local communities or how amok crime rages or how many millions of their dollars are wasted funding illegal immigration, change is not in the wind.
Polls show a sharp increase in voters’ concern about immigration and the issue has surpassed the economy and crime as the top worry. Voters say that since the White House is unwilling to resolve the problem, they worry the migrant influx will affect other aspects of their lives from crime and fentanyl deaths to national security and government spending.
A Wall Street Journal national poll conducted in late February found that 20% of voters now rank immigration as their top issue, up from 13% in December. In the same poll, 65% of voters said they disapproved of President Joe Biden’s handling of border security, and 71% said developments in immigration and border security are going in the wrong direction.
After more than three years of Biden’s open borders agenda, Americans have finally awakened to the grim but irrefutable truth that only the most egregious crimes committed against them will be punished. No indignity perpetrated against Americans that benefits illegal aliens will be perceived as offensive enough to reverse, regardless of the justified outcry against it. In Boston, for example, residents slam as “disgusting” a plan to turn a former veterans’ home into a shelter for hundreds of migrants.
Massachusetts locals insist, properly, that services should instead go to the nation’s heroes. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s (D) proposal came as veterans continue to face homelessness in the Bay State, with 545 vets living on the street during a single night in 2023, according to U.S. Housing and Urban Development data. Healey’s plan would allow the illegal aliens to live rent-free while vets had to pay.
Healey announced last week she would convert the historic Chelsea Soldiers’ Home, which was vacant and scheduled for demolition, into a site for 100 migrant families and pregnant women. The governor urged her constituents to take illegal aliens into their homes even though Healey and her partner haven’t set an example. Healey and attorney Joanna Lydgate live in a spacious four-bedroom single-family home built in 1939. The Healey household has room enough for an illegal immigrant family or two, but none have been invited. If Boston’s system for coping with illegal aliens is at capacity, as Healey claims, then she should be the first to reach out.
In January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a Colombian illegal immigrant charged with the rape of a minor in Lynn, Massachusetts. The suspect was arrested but later released by local authorities despite ICE’s request to hold him – a standard sanctuary city policy that puts residents at risk. Boston’s ICE officers have intensified efforts to remove dangerous criminals, but local sanctuary laws have stymied them.
The most recent example saw an elite group of Boston-based ICE officers make five arrests that included four alleged child rapists and an MS-13 gang member, a group of dangerous criminals the officers say were allowed on the streets because of local sanctuary policies that denied the agency’s detainer requests. Michelle Wu, Boston’s Democratic mayor, has remained silent on the city’s illegal alien crime wave and, despite the obviously urgent need to act, has not indicated any inclination to end its sanctuary city status.
The Center for Immigration classified Massachusetts as a sanctuary jurisdiction because of a 2017 state supreme court ruling which concluded that state law "provides no authority for Massachusetts court officers to arrest and hold an individual solely on the basis of a Federal civil immigration detainer, beyond the time that the individual would otherwise be entitled to be released from State custody."
Boston has plenty of company among major sanctuary city municipalities that stand by and watch illegal alien criminals destroy their communities: New York, Chicago, Denver, Washington D.C., San Francisco to name a few. While voters know that local and federal governments are willing to bankrupt their cities to keep illegal aliens comfortable, they also know that, sooner rather than later, space to house the continuous illegal alien inflow will run out. No more hotel rooms, no more gym space, no more property to build tent cities, no vacant street corners, and no airport terminals to house border surge will be available. Citizens wonder what will happen when there’s no more room anywhere and are rightly concerned that an increase in squatter home invasions is inevitable.
Joe Guzzardi is an Institute for Sound Public Policy analyst who has been writing about immigration for more than 30 years.
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