Bill Maher predicts that Democrats will lose the election badly if they continue on the path they are going on immigration.
The comedian is relentlessly pessimistic about President Joe Biden’s re-election chances due to perceptions about his age and the millions crossing the border.
Maher compared last week’s European Union elections, in which far-right parties made huge gains, to the US elections on November 5.
Immigration was not the only reason for the shift to the right, particularly in Germany, France, Spain, Poland and Italy, but it was an important point of the campaign.
“Voters in the European Parliament said again that we don’t like so much immigration,” Maher said on his HBO show Real Time.
Bill Maher Predicts Democrats Will Badly Lose Elections If They Continue Down The Road They’re Going On Immigration
Volunteers distribute food to migrants who crossed into the United States from Mexico in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.
Maher noted that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was often called a fascist for some of her far-right positions, but argued that moderate parties were allowing her to do so.
“If liberals insist that enforcing borders is a job only fascists will do, then voters will hire fascists to do what liberals won’t do,” he said, citing a 2019 article in The Atlantic.
‘Voters keep saying over and over again that we are not comfortable with this level of immigration. I understand why. It doesn’t make you racist to say that.
Maher did not specify why voters were uncomfortable with immigration, other than it was not solely due to racism.
He argued that the problem Democrats had with the issue was summed up by Sen. Alex Padilla’s response to Biden’s executive order limiting border crossings.
“By reviving Trump’s asylum ban, Biden has undermined American values,” the California lawmaker was quoted as saying.
“And then everyone steps back and says, ‘We don’t want to be called racist. So we will not take any steps towards immigration.”‘
Maher noted that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (pictured with Joe Biden at the G7 meeting on Thursday) was often called a fascist for some of her far-right positions, but argued that moderate parties were allowing her
Maher argued that this was exactly the wrong response, as it misjudged the current mood of American voters.
“This is going to screw them up on election day. It’s happening in Europe right now. This is demonstrated in Europe and it will happen here in the United States.” he said.
‘It happened with Brexit. It’s going to happen again.”
Brexit, in which the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, was disputed on many fronts, but one factor was the facilitation of migration to Britain from Europe.
Maher’s guest, the controversial columnist and author Joel Stein, responded by arguing that there was a “real moral reason” to admit asylum seekers.
—Any number? Maher asked, to which Stein agreed that it couldn’t be infinite. But that’s the point of it!’ Maher exclaimed in response.
Maher then cited a poll in which 64 percent of Hispanics said they supported giving the president authority to close the border.
Another 64 percent of all registered voters would immediately deport all immigrants “living in the United States illegally.”
“Yes, people hate immigrants,” Stein said of the survey results, but Maher insisted that wasn’t true, at least not as a sweeping generalization.
Migrants wait in line hoping to be processed by Customs and Border Patrol agents after groups arrived in Jacumba Hot Springs, California, after walking in intense heat from Mexico to the United States.
Biden’s executive order would close asylum claims when the average daily number of arrivals reached 2,500, and keep them closed until it fell to 1,500.
There are concerns that Biden’s order is not legally valid, since detaining people seeking asylum would violate international treaties or be an overreach of presidential authority, which is what the survey was about.
Seeking asylum at the border, as the vast majority of recent immigrants do, is not illegal, but sneaking in without asking for asylum is.
Maher made a similar warning last week on his show, when he called Biden’s executive order a last-minute ‘Hail Mary’ that wouldn’t work.
“If Biden loses this election, it will be because of two things: he is old… and immigration,” he said.
“I mean, just on a political level, I don’t think they could have handled it any worse.”
Maher cited a figure that ‘more than nine million immigrants have entered’ the US since Biden took office in January 2021.
‘That is more than the number of people living in Nicaragua. He let all of Nicaragua in,’ she joked.
‘The question Democrats don’t seem to have the courage to answer is how many is too many? And infinity is the answer: if you don’t give that answer, you are racist. That is your essential problem with this topic.
‘It’s a strange plan that, of course, no one liked. It seems like a last minute, it seems like he did nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Maher noted that Biden attempted to fix the problem with legislation that pumped enough money into immigration authorities so that asylum seekers could be processed in months or weeks, rather than years.
Migrants sit by a makeshift fire to warm themselves after crossing into the United States from Mexico in Jacumba Hot Springs, California.
The central problem with the immigration issue is that for decades the system has been too overloaded to function effectively.
Asylum seekers have to genuinely fear for their lives to obtain refugee status, and those who arrive for purely economic reasons are turned away.
This is determined by an immigration judge, but it takes five to nine years to get a hearing date and by then many immigrants will never be found.
Biden’s bill, created through bipartisan negotiations, would have potentially resolved this, but “Congress and Republicans deliberately increased that football” to appease Donald Trump, as Maher said.
‘They didn’t want this bill because they wanted it as a problem. So they could have fixed it themselves, but they didn’t,” he claimed.
“But now it seems that this is his last minute before the electoral Hail Mary passes, and he is not going to be successful.”