Poll: majority of Americans say southern border crisis is an ‘invasion’

by Jacob Fuller

Matt Bush, FISM News

 

A recent NPR/Ipsos poll shows that 53% of Americans describe the situation at the U.S. southern border as an “invasion.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection released their operational statistics for July 2022 and the numbers show why most Americans see the situation as they do. In total, there were 199,976 encounters along the border between the U.S. and Mexico last month.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) shared a video on Twitter Wednesday that allegedly shows U.S. Border Patrol agents unlocking and opening a border gate on private property to allow immigrants into the country. According to reports, members of the Texas National Guard had previously closed and locked the gate to prevent illegal immigration.

 

 

The July encounters were slightly lower than what happened in June, and CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus was quick to point out that “This marks the second month in a row of decreased encounters along the Southwest border. While the encounter numbers remain high, this is a positive trend and the first two-month drop since October 2021.”

Magnus pointed to a digital advertising campaign called “Say No to the Coyote” along with a strategy based on “Six Pillars” developed by the Biden Administration and CBP.

Despite Democratic politicians and bureaucrats touting digital advertising and their so-called strategy employed to stop illegal immigration at the border, Americans see it is not working. And it’s not just Republicans, 41% of Democrats and 43% of Independents joined the 75% of Republicans who believe that there is an “invasion” happening at the southern border.

Nearly 5 million foreign nationals have entered the country illegally since President Biden took office. In the past two years, there have been an average of 2.1 million encounters at the border compared to just 750,000 on average in the four years under the Donald Trump administration, an increase of close to 300%.

The fiscal year for Border Patrol reporting runs through September, and to date, the 1.8 million encounters at the southern border is already an annual record with two months still to come. If the numbers hold, U.S. customs agents will have had more than 2.2 million encounters in 12 months.

Republicans have blamed White House border policies for the crisis at the border. They have pointed to Biden’s rollbacks of Trump-era border policies like the construction of a border wall, the “remain-in-Mexico” policy, and migrant protection policies as reasons for why migrant numbers have increased so dramatically.

The Biden Administration and Democrats in general, on the other hand, have publicly claimed that they are seeking to fix what they call the root causes of immigration like poverty and corruption in Central and South America. The belief is that if there is an improvement in the conditions of their home countries, fewer people will try to cross the border illegally.

It is hard to argue with facts and numbers, though. And if the NPR poll numbers are any indication, an open border may not be the political win Democrats were hoping it would be.

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