Thought to be the first Sudanese American official elected to public office in the U.S., Mazahir Salih, finds immigration to be an issue of human rights instead of yielding it as a political tool. Deeply involved in supporting Iowa City’s immigrant community, Salih worries about the outcome of the upcoming general election.

Immigration is one of the top issues for voters in the narrowing race for the Oval Office. The majority of registered voters polled — 61 percent — say immigration is very important to their vote in the 2024 presidential election, according to a September Pew Research Center Poll.

Salih, also the co-founder and interim executive director of the Immigrant Welcome Network of Johnson County and Iowa City City Council mayor pro tem, focuses on helping and empowering immigrant families and said this work should be done regardless of the political climate.

“Unfortunately, it is often politicized. This can really distract from the real issue facing immigrants,” Salih said.

Most Iowans say it is necessary to address the southern border, according to a September Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll. The poll shows that 60 percent of Iowans consider securing the border “critical.”

Experts say it is common for immigration to be an issue in election cycles, but the number of voters who rank it as a top issue is unique to the 2024 election.

Drake University Political Science Professor Adrien Halliez said public opinion on the issue and candidates willingly bringing immigration to the forefront of their campaigns is out of the ordinary.

“What we’re seeing right now is fairly unprecedented,” Halliez said. “But immigration has always been fairly high in some elections as a top concern.”

Immigration surged to the top of voters’ priorities in February — 28 percent of Americans called it the most important problem in the U.S., according to a Gallup poll. The percentage is the highest share of Americans ranking the issue as the most important the country is facing since 1981.

The issue has pushed to the forefront of campaigns from the top to the bottom of the ballot. Halliez said Republican messaging on the issue forces Democrats to respond and discuss their own platforms.

Republican candidates center campaign messaging on securing the border and reducing all-time high border crossings. Contrarily, Democrats have been set on the defensive, batting against criticism that they are not doing enough to stem border crossings.

Illegal border crossings soared to record highs under Biden, averaging 2 million per year from 2021 to 2023. Crossings dropped sharply in the spring and summer after the Biden administration tightened border controls and closed off access to asylum.

In the race to the Oval Office, former President Donald Trump leads Vice President Kamala Harris among likely Iowa voters by 4 percentage points — 47 percent to 43 percent, according to a September Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll. These numbers reflect a much tighter race between Trump and Harris than the Trump-Biden matchup. In June, Trump led 50 percent to 32 percent in Iowa against the current president.

Nationally, however, the numbers are flipped. Polling updated on Oct. 23 by The New York Times shows Harris leading the national polling average by 2 percentage points. Trump trails with 47 percent to Harris’ 49 percent.

Immigration as a political issue

University of Iowa Political Professor Tim Hagle said immigration being at the top of voters’ minds and the front of candidates’ campaigns are directly related.

“The two things feed on each other,” Hagle said.  “If candidates mention it a lot, maybe mention the problems potentially, then the voters start to see that it’s more important, and vice versa.”

Hagle said the public being concerned about immigration forces political candidates to take notice of the issue and develop platforms and responses.

Down the ballot, Republican campaigns have elbowed immigration to the forefront, capitalizing on the importance of the issue to voters. A September national NBC News poll found voters overwhelmingly say they trust Republicans to do a better job with border security and immigration than Democrats.

GOP hopefuls push for border security and deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal permission.

Iowa’s 1st Congressional District incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks has made immigration a major tenet of her reelection campaign.

Miller-Meeks supports securing the border and limiting illegal entry while reforming the immigration system and providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. She wants to finish building a wall and utilize technology at the border to monitor and prevent crossings.

In an interview with The Daily Iowan, Miller-Meeks said she has campaigned so heavily on the issue because people think it’s a major problem.

“The Biden-Harris administration broke the border. They own this crisis,” Miller-Meeks said. “We had immigration under control under the Trump administration.”

Migrant crossings reached the lowest point of Biden’s administration in September, according to CBS News. In that month, U.S. Border Patrol agents recorded nearly 54,000 apprehensions of migrants who crossed into the country between legal entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border.

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This tally is the lowest number recorded by the agency since August 2020, and a 78 percent drop from a record high in December, when illegal border crossings hit 250,000.

Jacob Martin, a fifth-year student at the UI, plans on casting his ballot for Trump because of his stance on border security.

Martin said a secure border is necessary for a sovereign country, and human trafficking and drug trafficking hurt immigrants who are trying to come to the U.S. legally.

“Biden and Harris have not handled that very well with just letting basically anyone in here,” Martin said. “I don’t have a ton of faith in Trump, but I just hope that it’s better.”

Challenging Miller-Meeks for the second time, Iowa City Democrat and congressional candidate Christina Bohannan supports securing the border and limiting illegal entry while reforming the immigration system. She backs providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“The truth is that no one has done enough to fix this issue, not the president, not Congress. Not Democrats, not Republicans, no one has done enough to fix this issue,” Bohannan said.

Hagle said Trump pushed immigration as a campaign theme in his first go-around as a presidential candidate. After his failed attempts to build a complete wall at the southern border, he’s continued to dedicate time at nearly every campaign stop to discuss border issues and his plans should he win a second term.

Trump supports a historically restrictive agenda on immigration and advocates for what would amount to the largest deportation operation in American history. He plans to continue with his previous immigration policies from his first presidential term, such as finishing building a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. The former president also supports ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents.

Labeling Vice President Kamala Harris as President Joe Biden’s “border czar,” Trump and other Republicans have routinely criticized Democrats’ stance on immigration. Trump speaks frequently on the issue while campaigning Harris waned on the topic until a September visit to the border, where she outlined her policies. Fifty-five percent of likely Iowa voters say Trump would do a better job than Harris handling immigration, according to a September Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll. Nationally, polling shows 45 percent of voters say Trump is a better candidate to handle immigration issues, compared to 4 in 10 who prefer Harris.

Republicans have used the issue to needle Democrats, who have struggled to gain footing on the issue. Democrats previously hadn’t taken a hard-line stance on the issue, but since Republican criticism, the party has evolved its messaging to securing the southern border.

Harris supports securing the U.S.-Mexico border along with reforming the immigration system to make an easier path to citizenship. Samantha Sutton, a first-year student at the UI who immigrated from the Caribbean, said requirements for citizenship for immigrants should be made more realistic.

“I do understand the issues that people have with illegal immigration, but immigrating to America is an incredibly difficult process and a process I don’t think Americans themselves could even do if it was asked of them,” Sutton said.

Sutton plans to vote for Harris in the upcoming election.

“She can relate,” Sutton said, referring to the vice president. “She understands the struggles of being the child of an immigrant and the experiences of immigrants. And I feel like that experience is very necessary to have because you can easily talk about immigration but just be completely far away from the issue, and you don’t understand it fully. You may be like, ‘Oh, yeah, these rules are reasonable,’ but you’ve never been the person who had to adhere to these rules and see how much it’s asking of people, especially people who are trying to get into this country because they’re trying to get away from things that are worse.”

Both Bohannan and Harris accuse their opponents of worsening the situation at the border by killing a bipartisan border security act earlier this year. Both Democrats say they will bring the bill back and sign it into law.

Trump rallied Republicans to block the bill that tied border reforms to Ukraine aid, knifing legislation with the most extensive border reform in years. which included toughening asylum standards and hiring more border agents, asylum officers, and immigration judges.

Republicans argue the bill would never have survived even if Trump had not been involved.

Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart wrote in an email to the DI that Trump urged Republicans to vote down the bill they helped build so he could run on the issue this election cycle.

“During President Biden’s tenure, Republicans and Democrats worked on and agreed to an expansive border bill, one that would’ve helped stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. and solved many of the issues we see today,” Hart wrote. “Democratic leadership is working to solve immigration issues. Republican leadership is focused on using these issues as a talking point to win elections.”

David Barker, Iowa GOP finance chair, said the bill had no chance of passage regardless of Trump’s intervention because it was a bad bill.

“It made other changes to immigration law that were exactly what Harris and the Democrats want, which is more people crossing the border,” Barker said. “There are far better answers to the border than that bill.”

In the first and only debate of their race to a U.S. House seat, Bohannan criticized Miller-Meeks for doing the same as Trump by voting down the bill.

“Rep. Miller-Meeks keeps blaming the Biden administration,” Bohannan said in an interview with the DI. “The president has some power to act, but Congress has a wide authority to actually solve the problem. Rep. Miller Meeks had an opportunity to bring this bill to a vote and refused to do so, even though it would have been the most strict border bill that we have seen in our lifetimes.”

‘Every state is a border state’

Iowa Republicans push that border crossings at the southern border influence communities in the Hawkeye state, pointing to an increase in fentanyl in the state.

A January report by the Omaha Division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration showed Iowa saw a 105 percent increase in fentanyl seizures last year. Overdose deaths are rapidly declining across the U.S. with Iowa as an exception, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Border security, Republicans argue, will fix this problem. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law to make illegal immigration a state crime in Iowa earlier this year. The “illegal reentry law” gives state law enforcement officers the ability to charge people with an aggravated misdemeanor if they have been denied admission, deported, or if they currently have been ordered to leave the U.S.

A federal district court judge granted an injunction of the law this summer, ruling the law is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. Reynolds and Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird appealed the injunction, and the law remains in litigation.

Iowa’s law mirrors a recently adopted law in Texas, and both are backed by state leaders who criticize Biden for inadequate immigration enforcement.

Reynolds said in a statement following the injunction that she signed the bill to protect Iowans from the results of the border crisis: rising crime, overdose deaths, and human trafficking.

“With this injunction, states are left defenseless to the ongoing crisis at our southern border,” Reynolds said in the statement. “The Biden administration is failing to do their job and enforce federal immigration laws allowing millions to enter and re-enter without any consequence or delay.”

The law is considered one of the most far-reaching anti-immigration laws ever passed in Iowa. Iowa City City Council Member Salih is worried about the potential impacts on immigrants if Trump is elected for a second term.

She looks to policies the former president enacted while in office, including a travel ban barring people from a select group of countries that are predominantly Muslim.

To encourage her community to vote for Democrats down the ballot, Salih has been sending out messages reminding people of such policies.

“I will encourage everyone to vote Democrat up and down the ballot so we can have people who will treat people in this country fairly,” she said.

Salih said Democratic candidates will address issues immigrants face, including systemic barriers such as access to housing, health care, and education.

“We’re going to still fight and make sure of the immigration policy we need,” Salih said. “A candidate that fights for us and makes sure immigration policy reflects the dignity and the humanity of the people, rather than dividing.”