Biden’s Immigration Executive Order Hasn’t Improved His Standing on the Issue

President Joe Biden’s executive order to halt asylum requests at the U.S.-Mexico border amid a high level of migration has done nothing to immediately improve voters’ perceptions of his handling of immigration policy, according to Morning Consult’s weekly tracking of public opinion surrounding the 2024 presidential race.

According to our June 7-9 survey, 56% of voters disapprove of how Biden is handling immigration (up 3 percentage points over the past month), while 37% approve (down 3 points). 

The increase in negative sentiment was driven largely by independent voters (who went from 59% to 64% disapproval) and Republicans (from 83% to 87%), while views among Democrats were largely steady, with 1 in 5 disapproving of Biden’s approach to the issue.

The latest survey continues to show immigration as Biden’s worst performing policy issue, something that’s also true when voters are asked whether they trust him or former President Donald Trump more to handle the issue.

The presumptive Republican nominee has a 7-point advantage over Biden when it comes to whom voters trust more to handle immigration, including a 22-point lead on the issue among independent voters, marking an improvement over the past month.

The limited impact of Biden’s executive order on immigration may be explained by the fact that just 22% of voters said they’d seen, read or heard “a lot” about it, including 28% of Democrats, 20% of independents and 16% of Republicans. However, the week of its reveal did coincide with an improvement in the information voters reported hearing about the wider immigration issue — though it remained predominantly negative.

The survey found that 15% of voters said they’d recently seen, read or heard something positive about immigration, compared with 46% who said they’d consumed negative information. The 31-point gap between those two figures marks an improvement to the best buzz surrounding the issue since late November, though a large share of the electorate (39%) said they hadn’t recently heard anything about the issue at all.

The bottom line

The immigration issue continues to drag on Biden, just as it has since the beginning of his presidency when he, and many of his other policies, were popular with voters. Biden, who is running a tight race against Trump, has a tremendous amount of work to do in convincing the American people that he’s being tougher on immigration — something many voters want to see — even as Republicans continue to block bipartisan efforts to try to address the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Biden will likely need other Democrats to join him in making this pitch to the electorate, which may be a hard lift given internal Democratic divisions about the issue on Capitol Hill, suggesting there may be limits to improving his standing on an issue that is far more dominant this year than it was in the 2020 or 2022 election cycles.