At the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, some of us here warned the White House not to scrap the numerous Trump administration deals that, unlike the former president’s ephemeral dreams of the wall, actually succeeded in reducing encounters across the southern border by 88%.
Key among these were Donald Trump’s “safe third country” deals brokered with Northern Triangle nations to require would-be refugees to apply for asylum in the first safe country they reach. For example, the deals that Trump secured with Central American neighbors required that, say, an ethnic Mayan fleeing Guatemalan genocide would have to apply for asylum in the first safe country — in this case, Mexico, not the United States — if heading north.
Instead, Biden ripped up all those safe third country deals, reversed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, and began enacting the widespread catch-and-release of immigrants — including those ostensible asylum-seekers who didn’t even obtain a court date before being released into the country. We all know how this story ended, with southern border crossings up 155% from Biden’s inauguration, total crossings on pace to pass 2 million this year alone, and daily crossings ballooning to 8,000.
For nearly two years now, red state governors and mayors have tried to sound the alarm to the White House, which responded by sending Kamala Harris to Guatemala and promptly pretending to forget they ever put the vice president in charge of determining the “root causes” of the crisis. Now, with the situation so bad that law-abiding Hispanics (including those who elected a Republican the mayor of border bellwether McAllen, Texas) threatening to cost Democrats the midterm elections, Republicans have put so-called sanctuary cities to the test, shipping buses and planes of disproportionately single young men, often with no discernible cause for an asylum claim, to New York City, Washington, D.C., and other Democratic bastions of progressive values and inclusion.
What began as mere trollery championed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has escalated into an educational opportunity provided by Florida God King Ron DeSantis. Rather than add a slew of immigrants to the dilapidated denizens of Urban America’s skid rows and destitute downtowns, where working-class citygoers are used to tolerating strung-out hobos and drug-fueled loitering, DeSantis sent 50 immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, the billionaire’s backyard that just happens to be whiter than the driven snow.
Why is this such an effective ploy? Whereas the patricians of multimillion-person metropolises like New York can insulate themselves from a few thousand extra immigrants with gentrification, black car service, and well-paid and well-trained doormen, the summer colonizers of Martha’s Vineyard cannot hide, and worse, they have no moral defense from squatters. Half the town is leaving the island for the fall anyways. In a city with exactly one homeless shelter designed to care for 10 people, why shouldn’t a $15 million mansion with a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign not be expected to house whom the wokes like to term the “unhoused,” no longer just the “homeless”?
Better yet, DeSantis’s stunt illustrates not just why de facto open borders have proven a failed experiment but the specific merits of safe third country deals. International law grants refugees the right to seek asylum from specific types of persecution, not to obtain special privileges or opportunities. This is why Republicans and Democrats alike have historically, the current White House now excluded, been in favor of Cubans escaping communism by fleeing to Florida or Ukrainians rushing from Russia to get to Poland. Those are literally the first safe places those refugees can physically get to. Real refugees are looking for basic safety and freedom from specific persecution such as political, religious, or ethnic persecution. If they’re just looking for better real estate and a pay raise, they can wait in the back of the line like the rest of the millions who want to be Americans.
In other words, when liberals are livid that the immigrants have invaded their lily-white enclaves of private beach clubs and gated mansions instead of staying in Laredo and McAllen, ask them why Hondurans and Venezuelans couldn’t have just stayed in Mexico in the first place.
