Less than two days. That’s how long the residents of Martha’s Vineyard (average household income: $132,657) tolerated a planeload of 50 Venezuelan immigrants dumped on the tony island off the coast of Massachusetts. As CNN boasts, it took just 44 hours for the immigrants, chartered from Texas to the patrician playground courtesy of Ron DeSantis, to be sent to Joint Base Cape Cod.
The total number of immigrants crossing the southern border is set to cross 2 million in the fiscal year, the highest number in documented history. The 50 immigrants sent by the Florida governor is a mere fraction of those few thousand migrants sent by other red state governors to blue metropolises like New York City and Washington, D.C., over the summer. Those 50 are a mere fraction of those few thousand migrants who cross into border towns like Eagle Pass and Brownsville every single day. Hell, those 50 immigrants are a mere fraction of the 750-odd immigrants who have died at the southern border this year.
And yet, DeSantis’s stunt dominated the airwaves for 72 hours, retreating only for the funeral of the second-longest serving monarch in history.
What was it that made the Martha’s Vineyard story so delectable to conservatives and repugnant to liberals in a way that GOP-chartered migrant buses to Manhattan haven’t?
I have a theory. Especially since coronavirus lockdowns and the 2020 summer of race riots broke the fundamental covenant between a city and its taxpayers, we expect Manhattan moms and white-collar workers around the White House to cede the public (and publicly funded) spaces of parks and subway benches to bums, addicts, veterans abandoned by the country they risked their lives for, and everyone in between. The working class, unable to upgrade to gym memberships or houses in the suburbs, bears the brunt of growing throngs dependent on Uncle Sam, but the upper classes — the summer set on Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and beyond — get to flee.
And more importantly, they get to lock the plebeian class out of their swanky havens.
The apoplectic reaction to DeSantis sending a few dozen Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard is clearly indicative of the Left’s immigration NIMBYism (that is, the acronym for “not in my backyard,” an exclusionary brand of policymaking that prevents new housing and business development surrounding existing residential neighborhoods). The hypocrisy of Hate-Has-No-Home-Here liberals acting like Laredo is capable of funding 10,000 new jobless non-English speakers in a week but multimillionaires in Massachusetts can’t is so obvious that it’s beyond parody. But the Martha’s Vineyard mayhem also points a finger at the literal NIMBYism of limousine leftists who zone literal islands into multiacre plots of mansions to the exclusion of everybody else. Leftists everywhere don’t want to reap the consequences of President Joe Biden’s open borders incentives. But it’s the Leftists in areas like Martha’s Vineyard who cannot possibly face those consequences in person.
Unlike most of the blue state cities, which at least have decent physical resources to house vagabonds temporarily, Martha’s Vineyard has legally barred developers from creating that capacity. All six towns on the island have some sort of population density or property lot size maximum, and exceptions to the rules are often explicitly nepotistic, such as this stipulation from Chilmark, which states, “For the purpose of helping young people who have grown up in Chilmark and lived here for a substantial portion of their lives and who, because of the rising land prices, have been unable to obtain suitable land for their permanent home at a reasonable price, and who desire to continue to live in Chilmark, the Board of Appeals may grant a special permit to build a one-family dwelling for owner occupancy upon a lot having an area less than the minimum lot size prescribed by this bylaw for the district in which such lot is located, if the Board finds that placing of a one-family dwelling on such lot will not a material, detrimental effect upon, or be inconsistent with, the established and future character of the neighborhood and the Town, and the applicant for the special permit covenants, in a form satisfactory to the Board, not to sell or otherwise transfer the ownership or lease, except for summer occupancy, such lot for a period of ten years, except for cases of hardship as approved by the Board of Appeals.”
To be abundantly clear, the Left, like the Right, is far from a monolith on NIMBYism. The YIMBY Left ranges from popularlist liberals like Matt Yglesias and literal socialists like Tiffany Caban. But if El Paso represents the most inclusive cadre of the Democratic Party, Martha’s Vineyard represents the opposite. It’s not that the island just so happens not to have a sizable homeless shelter or cheap hotel to house the DeSantis immigrants or enough of a working class to provide sufficient social services to do so — it’s that the voters who boast about their benevolence have legally made all of that so in the name of preserving their own profit potential from local housing values, otherwise known as “the established and future character of the neighborhood.”
None of this is to say that Martha’s Vineyard or Laredo or anywhere else should be milking citizens already suffocated by an 8.3% consumer price index increase for more cash for immigrants who overwhelmingly may not have any legitimate claim to legal asylum. So-called chain migration and work visas have been the legal immigration status quo for decades for a reason, a social safety net outside of taxpayer funds, as well as legitimate refugee status restricted to legitimate claims.
But if the same activist Left that cheered on Biden ripping up his predecessor’s immigration policies are now reaping what they sow, at least punish those most hypocritical elitists who cannot fathom living alongside the more impoverished of their own countrymen, let alone the illegal immigrants they claim to embrace.
