Thirty-five percent of Americans say the top priority for the first 100 days of the next presidency should be migration, according to an Ipsos survey for Reuters.
That one-on-three score is more than three times the 11 percent share of the second-ranked “First 100 Days” priority — income inequality.
Taxes — and health care — score only a 10 percent share.
The priority rankings are very different from what voters say when they are asked about the most important issues, Ipsos noted:
The economy is the seen as the most important problem [for Washington, DC] for 27% of registered voters, followed by political extremism or threats to democracy (22%), and then immigration (16%).
The First 100 Days answer suggests that President Kalama Harris might quickly press Congress to pass a law that would raise immigration levels under the guise of improving border security.
But those survey results also suggest that a reelected President Donald Trump will face pressure to focus on curbing migration. That focus would be different from his first term when he quickly pivoted away from migration and pushed a large tax cut through Congress.
That 2017 shift followed pressure from Trump’s business allies, many who still demand that government invite more economic migrants.
“The U.S. economy needs immigration, and the ebb and flow of humans [across the border] is the market responding to demand,” the Wall Street Journal declared Sunday. “The Biden administration’s decision to use legal parole to accept 30,000 migrants a month from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua is a common-sense and humane approach to managing migration,” it declared.
If Trump is in the Oval Office, Democrats — and some Republicans — will resist his promise of mass deportations.
But many Republicans recognize they need to fulfill campaign promises.
“There’s about 4.5 million who would be the first priority for that, people who’ve already committed crimes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on October 24. “They’re in the system now [for] shoplifting, or whatever it is … or [having] done things that are untoward or unlawful.”
“We’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. What do we do with them?” Sen. JD Vance said in his October 1 Vice Presidential debate. “I think the first thing that we do is we start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime, in addition to crossing the border illegally.”
Any debate about migration levels will likely include a debate over the damage caused to ordinary Americans’ workplace productivity and their declining family fertility.
In Canada and the United Kingdom, birth rates have crashed amid wage cuts and housing spikes caused by advocates for more migration. Bloomberg reported Monday:
The fertility rate in England Wales fell to a record low in 2023, as financial pressures and wider societal shifts put young people off starting a family.
Women had an average of 1.44 children, the lowest figure since records began in 1938 and down sharply since 2010 when the rate was 1.94, data from the Office for National Statistics showed on Monday. In London the rate was even lower at 1.35.
The figures will set off alarm bells over a worsening demographic crisis that is set to ramp up the pressure on the workforce and the public finances. The national level is well below the natural replacement rate of 2.1
In contrast, Larry Fink, the head of the $10 trillion Blackrock investment group, has urged governments to reduce the migration that is used to inflate their consumer economies and to instead raise the productivity of their nation’s citizens.
“We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth,” Fink said at a pro-globalist event in April hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology … If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
Canada’s government has recently trimmed its massive immigration inflow, boosting bankers’ hopes that Canadian companies will redirect funds to raise the nation’s stalled productivity.
“We need to dispel the narrative that slower population growth will be bad for the economy,” said an October 24 report by Robert Kavcic, the senior economist at BMO, a major bank based in Montreal. “Real GDP per capita has been stagnant on balance since 2016 … One can argue that the surge in [migrants] has diverted resources to housing and allowed firms to lean on low-cost labour, at the expense of productivity,” Kavcic wrote.
