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President Joe Bidens job approval is lower than Barack Obamas or Donald Trumps at this point in their presidencies. Each of those predecessors saw his party lose control of the House of Representatives in his second year in office.

Midterm elections typically go badly for the party in power. Its opponents are aggrieved, its supporters disappointed at worst or complacent at best. But the Democrats are facing an additional challenge this year: an issue environment that accentuates their weaknesses.

Inflation is unquestionably the top issue for American voters right now. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 50% of voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on handling it, while only 31% had more faith in the Democrats. Its a big advantage, and its not a fluke.

Inflation has been dormant for a long time in the U.S.: ABC News had not conducted a poll on which party was most trusted on dealing with the problem since the George H. W. Bush administration. It turns out that the Republicans had roughly the same advantage 30 years ago, too.

It may be, then, that Democrats arent just suffering because inflation has been high on their watch or even because Biden (like the Federal Reserve and many economists) clearly underestimated how long it would stay high. The public could just be primed to trust Republicans on the issue, the way its primed to trust Democrats on, say, Medicare.

Democrats are trying to build their own reputation as inflation-fighters presumably that is a key reason Biden wrote an op-ed about the subject for the Wall Street Journal but also want to get voters to put a higher priority on other issues that are more favorable to their party. Abortion and gun violence top that list.

The same ABC/Post poll found the Democrats with a 10-point advantage on abortion, and many polls suggest they are in sync with public opinion in seeking stricter regulation of guns. On both issues, however, intensity has often been on the side of conservatives.

Democrats are also eager to make a campaign issue out of former President Donald Trump, and his disgraceful effort to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. But this tactic failed last year in Virginia, where Trump is less popular than he is nationally. It seems unlikely that it is going to move voters more this fall.

Republicans, of course, can also try to elevate other issues. They have been blaming progressive prosecutors for rising rates of violent crime and for public disorder, and think San Franciscos recent recall of its district attorney illustrates the potency of this issue. (The ABC/Post poll found that Republicans have a 12-point advantage on crime.) They have also laid the groundwork to attack Bidens immigration policies if conditions at the U.S.-Mexico border get visibly worse.

The issues Republicans want to highlight inflation, crime, and illegal immigration all fit into a larger conservative story about government. Each of them involves a failure by the government at a core task: maintaining the value of the currency, suppressing violence, regulating the border.

They thus reinforce public suspicions about the competence of government and, therefore, about ambitious proposals for government-directed social change. They threaten the publics sense of stability, order and control the very things conservative politicians specialize in offering, if they can avoid coming across as radicals themselves.

Democrats spent several months trying to enact a Build Back Better agenda with high-flown rhetoric about a once-in-a-generation opportunity to enact transformational policies that lift up peoples lives. With voters upset about prices at the gas pump, that kind of talk now seems laughable. So, increasingly, does the prospect that Democrats will keep their majority in the U.S. House.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Ramesh Ponnuru: The Republicans three-pronged strategy to win back the House - St. Paul Pioneer Press

President Joe Biden speaks during opening ceremony of the the 9th Summit of the Americas at the Los ... [+] Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, California, on June 8, 2022. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

In a declaration at the Ninth Summit of the Americas, the Biden administration proposed to expand legal pathways to discourage illegal immigration to the United States. The declaration and accompanying policy statements recognize that attempting to end illegal entry through enforcement alone has failed for half a century.

The Declaration: On June 10, 2022, the United States, Canada, Argentina, Brazil and more than a dozen other nations issued the The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration.

The leaders of the countries at the summit stated in the declaration: We . . . reiterate our will to strengthen national, regional, and hemispheric efforts to create the conditions for safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration and to strengthen frameworks for international protection and cooperation. . . .

We affirm that regular pathways, including circular and seasonal labor migration opportunities, family reunification, temporary migration mechanisms, and regularization programs promote safer and more orderly migration. We intend to strengthen fair labor migration opportunities in the region, integrating robust safeguards to ensure ethical recruitment and employment free of exploitation, violence, and discrimination, consistent with respect for human rights and with a gender perspective. . . .

Strengthen and expand temporary labor migration pathways, as feasible, that benefit countries across the region, including through new programs promoting connections between employers and migrant workers, robust safeguards for ethical recruitment, and legal protections for workers rights.

The Biden administration framing the migration issue (correctly) as regional has encouraged other countries, including Spain and Canada, to assist in offering solutions, including by providing visas to more workers.

U.S. Policies: A White House Fact Sheet detailed new U.S. policies in conjunction with the declaration. In some cases, the policies are not new but restore or supplement recent or existing measures. These include adding to current U.S. visa categories and admitting individuals as refugees or via parole.

The White House Fact Sheet states:

More Workers or More Restrictions on Hiring Workers?: Admitting more temporary workers would reduce the number of people who choose to enter the United States unlawfully. National Foundation for American Policy research found admitting more Mexican farmworkers via the Bracero program reduced illegal entry (apprehensions) at the border by 95% between 1953 and 1959.

The summit declaration and White House fact sheet advocate admitting more workers. However, other Biden administration policies appear to make it more complex or expensive to employ temporary workers, which could result in fewer workers being admitted to the United States.

U.S. employers view the H-2A category for agricultural workers as problematic and are unhappy with a proposed Biden administration H-2A regulation. The U.S. Apple Association criticized the rule: US Apple believes this rule is misguided and will create additional administrative burden and cost to an already costly program. . . . If this rulemaking does go forward it will triple or quadruple the filings the Department receives annually . . . while costing growers more in application costs and providing very little benefit to a shrinking U.S. agricultural workforce. This program is critical to the apple industry with more and more growers entering the program each year. However, it is expensive, bureaucratic and out of touch with the realities of todays production agriculture.

For those who think the problem is that H-2A workers are underpaid, note that on December 9, 2021, the Department of Labor announced it fined a Florida beekeeping company after it paid H-2A workers more than U.S. workers: Big River Honey of Gulf County paid $7,265 in civil money penalties after the division cited several violations, including: Advertising multiple requirements for U.S. workers, but not applying the same conditions to the H-2A workers. Paying H-2A workers a higher rate than corresponding U.S. workers doing the same jobs. (Emphasis added.)

The best reforms for H-2A, H-2B (nonagricultural seasonal workers) and any new visa category are to increase portability for workers and accessibility for employers. That would provide better recourse and more options for workers in difficult employment situations. Forcing immigrant workers to be without legal status, which happens when legal visas are unavailable, is the least likely way to improve the well-being of U.S. or foreign workers.

Analysts note legal visa categories should not be judged against an unattainable state of perfection, but against the alternative of the hundreds of men, women and children who cross the U.S. border and die each year because legal options are unavailable.

Anti-Smuggling Efforts: The White House Fact Sheet announced new anti-smuggling enforcement efforts: The President will announce a first of its kind campaign, unprecedented in scale, to disrupt and dismantle smuggling networks in Latin America.

A recent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis should temper expectations a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) anti-smuggling initiative will produce lasting results. The low barrier to entry to become a human smuggler is a reason for pessimism that U.S. law enforcement could ever succeed in ending or significantly curtailing human smuggling, according to the NFAP review of the academic and law enforcement literature on human smuggling. It takes few assets to become a smuggler, and some prominent smugglers are even teenagers. The low barrier to entry for human smuggling is a global phenomenon.

DHS notes stricter immigration enforcement has increased human smuggling. Today, approximately 95% of unlawful border crossers employ smugglers compared to 40% to 50% in the 1970s.

The Biden administration deserves credit for giving a central role to legal pathways for work and humanitarian migration to relieve misery and reduce illegal immigration. However, reducing illegal entry by a significant amount will require a larger number of visas, including for nonagricultural workers, and more refugee slots to assist those fleeing persecution and dangerous conditions.

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Biden Advocates More Legal Pathways To Reduce Illegal Immigration - Forbes

More than 600 Haitians have reached the U.S. mainland in the last eight months after sailing across the treacherous Caribbean pass; many others have died trying to make the journey. This is,the Miami Herald reports,"the largest exodus of boat refugees since 2004." It is also what happens when a group of people wants to flee dire circumstances but lacks a safe and predictable immigration path.

Political and economic conditions in Haiti have long been terrible, but they worsened last year after a devastating earthquake and the assassination of President Jovenel Mose. Violence in Haiti, poor conditions in Latin American countries where other Haitians had settled, and additional factors compelled thousands of Haitians to journey to the United States. That mass migration came to a head in September, when around 15,000 Haitians gathered at the U.S.Mexico border, some of them clashing with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents as they tried to reach American soil.

In 2020, President Donald Trump invoked Title 42 of the Public Health Service Act to enact a policy of allowing immediate expulsions of migrants at the border, a policy that remains in place today. Many migrants, thus barred from beginning the formal asylum-seeking process, were simply sent back to Haiti. The Biden administration has expelled more than 25,000 Haitians since September. Around 4,000 were sent back to Haiti last month.

With land-based migration proving difficult, some desperate Haitians are attempting to reach American soil aboard overcrowded ships. The Miami Herald reports that five boats of undocumented Haitian migrants have reached the Florida Keys since November. While others reach Puerto Rico, most are intercepted in the waterand many drown, undetected. A boat trying to reach the U.S. in May capsized, resulting in the deaths of 11 Haitian women. Another vessel carrying two dozen Haitians bound for the U.S. has been missing since March.

Border hardliners often claim that chaos will erupt if Title 42 expulsions are halted and the standard asylum process resumes. But as the Cato Institute's David J. Bier points out, illegal immigration from Haiti (and other Caribbean nations) is a policy choice. "In October 2016, nearly 7,500 asylum seekers from Haiti and Cuba crossed the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States," Bier writes. "Just 6 did so illegally.99.9 percent of all crossings from these two countries happened legally through lawful ports of entry." That number had essentially reversed by October 2021, when 99.7 percent of the 7,000 Haitians and Cubans who crossed the border did so illegally.

In the early 2010s, border guards "at southwest ports of entry adopted a policy of generally granting parole to Haitian asylum seekers," Bier points out, after the Obama administration suspended removals of Haitians without criminal records. They were legally permitted to enter the country, claim asylum, and receive work authorization. But starting in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security required the CBP to detain all incoming Haitians and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported (unless they could demonstrate a credible fear of persecution in their home country). A significant proportion of Haitians began to enter the U.S. illegally after this policy change and other Trump-era restrictions on asylum.

Immigration officials warn that sea arrivals could come to resemble migration patterns in the 1980s and 1990s, when groups of 70 to 100 Haitians would heap into one makeshift boat bound for the United States. "Our general worry is this could replicate over the summer and this could become a trend," CBP spokesperson Jeffrey Quiones told The Washington Post.

Restoring asylum is an important step in preventing more tragedies, and so is employment-based immigration. Thankfully, the Biden administration has said it will provide 11,500 H-2B nonagricultural seasonal worker visas for people from northern Central America and Haiti. Shutting down safe and legal migration options won't prevent truly desperate Haitians from attempting to escape danger, but reopening them can help prevent deadly journeys.

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Haitians Headed to US Are Drowning Because of Limited Immigration Options - Reason

ICE agents tracked down a smuggler who separated a 1-year-old girl from her mother as they tried to make their way deeper into the U.S., arresting the smuggler and reuniting the family.

The Mexican woman and her 11-year-old son were apprehended by Border Patrol agents in western Texas on Saturday, according to court documents. Thats when the mother revealed her daughter had also been with them but had been separated in Mexico so the baby could be smuggled through a border crossing rather than trekked through the desert.

Agents searched the mothers phone and found details on the smuggling operation, including a picture of a bus ticket that had apparently been bought for the infant showing she was to be taken from El Paso to Dallas.

Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stepped in to help. They spotted a woman carrying a small child show up just as the bus was getting ready to depart.

Agents say the woman, identified as Rubye Ramos, at first insisted the baby was hers and presented a birth certificate for a 4-year-old. When agents told her they knew the child wasnt hers, they said she broke down in tears and handed the baby over, acknowledging it wasnt hers.

This is one more example of the callous and ruthless tactics used by transnational criminal organizations that often use the most vulnerable migrants children as a commodity, said Gloria I. Chavez, chief patrol agent in the Border Patrols El Paso sector.

Ms. Ramos faces a human smuggling charge.

She was ordered held without bond until a detention hearing later this week.

She is a U.S. citizen but lives in Mexico, and prosecutors argued she couldnt be counted on to remain in the U.S. unless she was detained.

The Trump administration drew attention several years back for its zero-tolerance border policy, which had the effect and critics argued the intended consequence of separating illegal immigrant families caught at the border.

The parents were arrested and since there are no family facilities in federal jails, the children were placed in the case of the Health and Human Services Department. But the government failed to reunite the families once the parents were out of the criminal justice system often a matter of just a day or two.

Thousands of families were separated and authorities say hundreds remain so today, four years later.

The border case presents the other side of that coin parents who voluntarily separate from their children to make an illegal entry into the U.S.

Smugglers will sometimes decide for their own reasons that a family shouldnt enter or be transported together, and split children from adults with the intention to reunite them at a destination deeper in the U.S.

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ICE reunites illegal immigrant mother with baby held by smuggler - Washington Times

The super PAC supporting Republican Herschel Walker is going on television with a seven figure ad buy attacking Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock as the general election campaign in the Georgia Senate race heats up.

The super PAC, 34N22, is hitting the broadcast and cable airwaves in the Atlanta media market, Georgias biggest, while also running the new advertisement on digital platforms across the rest of the Peach State. The spot ties Warnock to embattled President Joe Biden and blames both Democrats for the surge in illegal immigration at the southern border since Donald Trump left the White House, though the former president is not mentioned by name.

Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock have opened the floodgates to the massive surge in illegal immigration, crime, drugs, and fatalities we are seeing in communities across Georgia, 34N22 spokesman Stephen Lawson said in a statement. The super PAC, named after Walkers jersey number at the University of Georgia and in the NFL, 34, as well as 2022, the election year, first shared its new ad with the Washington Examiner.

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The advertisement opens with a visual of a kitchen sink faucet, first just dripping water and then turned on at full strength.

By 2020, illegal immigration had slowed to a trickle. Then, Joe Biden and Raphael Warnock took over. Illegal border crossings surged, the voiceover says as the spot opens. Illegal drugs like fentanyl poured in. Violent crime flooded America.

Walker, 60, was recruited by Trump to run for Senate. He was crowned the GOP nominee in the May 24 primary, easily defeating state Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black. Despite living in Texas for several years, Walker, a Heisman Trophy winner, is a folk hero in Georgia for leading the Bulldogs to a national championship in 1980. He begins his bid to oust Warnock well known and relatively popular.

But Walker also has political baggage that Democrats are hoping to exploit, including unanswered questions about his extensive business holdings as well as past instances of domestic abuse, much of which the Georgia Republican personally, and voluntarily, disclosed years before he entered politics. Meanwhile, Republicans believe Warnock also has liabilities from his personal life that could trip up his reelection bid.

Warnock, 52, a pastor by trade, was elected to the Senate in January 2021 after defeating then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R) in a special election runoff.

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Loeffler was appointed to replace Johnny Isakson in early 2020 after he resigned from the Senate for health reasons. Warnock is a talented politician who had built a $23 million war chest as of May 4 but nonetheless faces a tough reelection bid this fall. Georgia is a swing state, and Democrats are vulnerable up and down the ticket, largely due to Bidens political struggles.

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Herschel Walker super PAC hits Raphael Warnock over illegal immigration - Washington Examiner