Growing frustration on immigration threatens to erode Biden’s Latino support

NOGALES, Arizona — When Arturo Garino was mayor of Nogales, he joined fellow border mayors to campaign for national Democratic candidates, including then-President Barack Obama.

Now out of public office and with Arizona becoming an immigration hot spot,he told NBC News that he’s certain he won’t be campaigning for President Joe Biden. Though he voted for him in 2020, he said in an interview last month, he doesn’t know how he’ll vote this November.

“I don’t think what this administration is doing it right — letting all these people just come across,” Garino told NBC News. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m pretty pissed off.”

President Biden’s executive order signed Tuesday, dramatically restricting access to asylum for migrants at the border, shows just how vexing immigration is for his campaign, even among Latino voters who have generally sided with his party on the issue.

Voters like Garino, who once chastised the administration for continuing a pandemic ban on border crossings, are frustrated over the high number of migrant arrivals in recent years. At the same time, many blame Biden for a failure to deliver on promises for immigration reform for long-settled immigrants without legal status, despite years of blockades to legalization by Republicans in Congress.

In a presidential race with razor-thin margins, any erosion of Latino support in such a heavily Latino battleground state could be consequential.

A shrinking advantage?

As has historically been the case, immigration is not the top voting issue for Latinos in this election. But many Latino voters have used immigration as a litmus test, judging those to be anti-immigrant to also be anti-Latino, said Carlos Odio, a co-founder of Equis Research, a Democrat-leaning Latino