Analysis by Summer Lane | Photo: Alamy
Immigration is priority number one for many voting Americans in 2024, and broad concern on this issue may have added fuel to President Donald Trump’s successful primary campaign in Iowa.
According to Gallup, a plurality of Americans today see the unchecked U.S.-Mexico border problems as a “crisis.” This amounts to 39 percent who see unfettered illegal immigration as a crisis, while another 33 percent see it as a “major problem,” per their data.
In December 2023, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) revealed shocking statistics at the border, reporting that there were 302,000 illegal migrant encounters in December alone, shattering all previous records for encounters in a single month.
President Donald Trump has often said that he believes that as many as 15 to 16 million illegal migrants will have relocated to the United States by the end of Joe Biden’s term in the White House.
He has relentlessly hammered home his plan to fix immigration in America while on the campaign trail, particularly in the Hawkeye State.
Leading up to the historic caucuses on Monday night, Trump devotedly traveled across the state and presented his Agenda47 policy platform, which is aimed at making America great again.
One of the foundational aspects of that policy platform is his commitment to implementing common-sense border security measures.
For example, he has vowed to “terminate” every open border policy from the Biden administration and promised to kick-start a deportation operation to physically remove millions of unvetted migrants from American soil.
According to a survey from AP VoteCast conducted before the Iowa caucuses, many respondents indicated that immigration was their number one issue, with nine out of 10 caucus-goers indicating that they would support building a wall at the southern border.
Clearly, the deluge of illegal immigration is a hot-button issue, even for voters who are not living in border states.
In his victory speech on Monday night, President Trump also heavily focused on immigration in his remarks, reiterating the importance of that issue to his campaign and to his supporters.
He stated, “We’re going to come together, we’re going to drill, baby drill right away, we’re going to seal up the border, because right now we have an invasion of millions and millions of people that are coming into our country.”
Trump explained that the current open border policies were “not sustainable as a country” and vowed to “stop the invasion” that has been ongoing.
In Iowa, it appears that immigration was a big factor for caucus-goers on Monday night, and if the polls are any indication, it may be one of the biggest winning issues for Trump headed into the rest of the primary and the general election in November.
