Rachel Maddow, Jen Psaki Mock Voter Concerns about Illegal Immigration during Super Tuesday Panel

MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Jen Psaki mocked voter concerns about illegal immigration during the network’s coverage of the Super Tuesday primaries, expressing their disbelief that the issue could be so salient in this year’s elections.

Psaki, bringing up the issue, said, “I live in Virginia. Immigration was the number one issue,” to laughs from the rest of the panel. Maddow chimed in, joking that “Virginia does have a border with West Virginia,” to which Psaki replied incredulously, “you’re thinking, like, what?”

The issue of immigration has — for the first time since 2019 — become the most important problem voters say the United States faces, according to a Gallup poll released in late February. Twenty-eight percent of respondents cited immigration as the country’s biggest challenge, while the government came in second place at 20 percent and the economy come in third at 12 percent. Immigration is the only issue on which respondents to the Gallup poll had moved over preceding month; in January, only 20 percent of Americans surveyed said it is the most pressing problem with which the U.S. contends.

Fifty-five percent of respondents — an all-time high — believe immigration to be a critical threat to American interests, representing an 8-point increase from 2023. Ninety percent of Republicans and 54 percent of independents agreed with the sentiment, while only 29 percent of Democrats said the same. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed characterized immigration as a serious problem that does not reach the level of a critical threat, and just 14 percent said the issue was neither dire nor important.

While Psaki mocked Americans’ concerns over immigration during her MSNBC coverage of Tuesday night’s contests, she has previously taken a different position. As President Joe Biden’s first White House press secretary, she often assured journalists at her press conferences and the American people at large that the president took illegal immigration seriously.

Answering reporter questions in a March 2021 press conference, Psaki advertised the administration’s use of the Trump-era Title 42 to block illegal immigrants from residing in the U.S.

“The border remains closed,” she told a reporter concerned with the Biden administration’s approach to immigration policy. “Families and single adults are being expelled under Title 42 and should not attempt to cross illegally.”

Psaki, seemingly recognizing the importance of illegal immigration as a policy issue, often blamed Republicans for America’s problems dealing with influxes of migrants. During a September 2021 press conference, she said there were “a lot of Republicans out there giving speeches about how outraged they are about the situation at the border” but that they were not “putting forward solutions.

Since Psaki left the White House in May 2022, the situation at the border has only deteriorated further: Border Patrol encountered a record 2.4 million illegal immigrants at the Southern border in fiscal year 2023.