MSNBC anchor Joe Scarborough said Monday that Democrats have “badly mishandled” the border crisis and are out of touch with the majority of Americans on immigration.
Scarborough argued that most Americans disapprove of illegal immigration and that the border crisis does “not seem to matter” to the Democratic Party.
“Democrats have badly mishandled the southern border over the past several years, horribly,” Scarborough said. “It just, the issue doesn’t seem to matter to them at all. It matters to most Americans. Most Americans believe that if you come to America, you need to come into America legally. That’s where most Americans are. If that shocks you, you need to wake up, okay? You need to wake up.”
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The “Morning Joe” host said the issue of immigration could be a “huge win” for Republicans if they did not “overreach.” He criticized Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, however, for allegedly treating migrants as “political pawns” by sending 50 migrants who voluntarily boarded planes to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. (RELATED: Scarborough Says There Is ‘Nothing Progressive’ About Encouraging Illegal Immigration)
“They overreach by taking people who are fleeing a communist tyranny in Nicaragua, in Venezuela, coming up to the United States and then treating them like political pawns,” Scarborough claimed. “These poor, hungry refugees from a communist country. It is the antithesis and if you don’t believe me, go to the Google machine, it is the antithesis of everything [former President] Ronald Reagan believed, everything Ronald Reagan did, everything Ronald Reagan would have done.”
“You have a party that’s not conservative, you have a party that is not following Edmund Burke and [Russell] Kirk and Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s view of conservatism. You have radicals who are following, going down the path of where [Hungarian Prime Minister Victor] Orban is, where [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is, and it’s frightening.”
Migrant encounters have more than doubled since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, according to CBP data. Agents apprehended a total of 458,088 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2020 fiscal year before surging to 1.7 million in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration.