The nation's ability to survive the Covid-19 pandemic does not depend on continuing the DACA amnesty, despite a major attempt to suggest otherwise in the elite East Coast media this week.
As always, the numbers in the debate have to be put in context.
Two of the seven GOP Senate candidates in Alabama's Primary this week ran on immigration-reduction platforms after having earned career A+ NumbersUSA grades for their work in Congress.
Together, the two won 58% of the votes on Tuesday (31.7% by Jeff Sessions and 24.9% by Bradley Byrne). Sessions and former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville (who won 33.4%) will compete in a March 31 runoff election.
Veteran New York Times reporter Robert Pear, 69, is being extolled for his meticulous, fair-minded, no-nonsense approach to complicated policy topics. And that was the way that we at NumbersUSA experienced him in his occasional coverage of us and our policy topic.
For the moment, I have to say that I was relieved when the President got through his long State of the Union section on immigration.
There had been so much talk about the possibility of a big new announcement and about the efforts of at least a few inside the White House to put together some kind of new comprehensive compromise plan, I was braced for some major backtracking. I breathed a sigh of relief when he moved on to the trade issue without offering an amnesty or asking for larger guest worker programs.
On the eve of his State of the Union address, the president is under great pressure to increase the number of foreign workers instead of continuing to honor his campaign promises that immigration policies should prioritize the needs of Americans who have not benefited by the national economy in recent decades
We commissioned a survey of voters in yesterday's midterm elections in "Toss-Up Districts." It found strong opposition to trading a border wall for DACA amnesty. Voters in these tightly contested districts want any DACA amnesty to also include mandatory E-verify and an end to extended family migration.
Voters handed us a much changed Congress for immigration. NumbersUSA lost and kept some great allies. And voters replaced some F-graders with new allies. How this all shakes out over the next two years still remains to be seen. Here are some initial thoughts.
With all the sensational campaign coverage of immigration issues this month, NumbersUSA commissioned Pulse Opinion Research to find out how those issues are affecting the views of likely midterm voters in congressional districts with the closest races. Those are the races that will determine which Party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.
The closest races for the U.S. House of Representatives include 16 with a candidate committed to lower immigration who is competing with a candidate who is not. Most of these 16 -- who are as likely to lose as to win -- are incumbents with good reduction records in Congress.
Although it came up 20 votes short of passing, H.R. 4760 ("the Goodlatte bill") yesterday gained the most votes in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives in terms of mandating E-Verify and ending the chain migration categories.
That is something to celebrate!