Commentary: Americans’ Fear of Illegal Immigration Fallout Now Eclipses COVID Concerns

For a long time, Americans were hungry for doomsday coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, and establishment media outlets were happy to oblige.

The phenomenon led to “doomscrolling,” which Dr. Ariane Ling, a psychologist and assistant professor at New York University’s Langone Health, described as “the act of endlessly scrolling down one’s news apps, Twitter and social media and reading bad news.”

“In the efforts to make information accessible to all, many major news resources like are offering coverage of COVID for free,” Ling told Healthline in July. “This creates both less barriers to being informed, but it also adds to the abundance of doomsday headlines out there.”

The crippling fear of COVID-19 fueled by media handwringing was reflected in public polling.

In June, the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Americans believed the coronavirus pandemic was a major problem.

In a follow-up survey published last August, 62 percent of voters said the pandemic would play a very important role in determining their choice for president. The survey polled 11,001 U.S. adults from July 27 to Aug. 2 and had a margin of error of +/- 1.5 percentage points.

The puzzle pieces have shifted since then.

Prophecies of doom and gloom no longer weigh on people’s minds, and the country is eager to return to normal. It’s certainly been long enough.

Since President Joe Biden took office, however, Americans have been forced to turn their attention to the