What made the Left so furious when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis flew 50 migrants to Martha’s Vineyard? It got under liberal skin more than Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dropping a couple of busloads on Vice President Kamala “The Border is Secure” Harris’s doorstep in Washington, D.C., although liberals excoriated that, too.
It can’t have been an objection in principle, for leftists defend President Joe Biden busing thousands of migrants to small Texas border towns and stranding them there. They’re cool also with him tricking illegally migrating Haitians on to planes bound for the Caribbean “s***hole” the victims haven’t lived in for years. And you hear no griping from bien pensants of the Left when Democratic mayors in Texas add to Abbott’s northward transports to New York City.
The lefties also accuse DeSantis of cruelty, but you have to fall into the common error of assuming one’s political opponents are stupid to think they believe this. Attorney Rachel Self, briefing the press with much casuistic tripe, said, “Ensuring that no help at all awaited the migrants was the entire point.” What a load of manure!
Of course, the point wasn’t to prevent the migrants from getting help. No one still awake believed that local authorities in Martha’s Vineyard would ignore the migrants once they got off the aircraft. It was obvious that when they set foot on the luxurious and desirable acres of the Massachusetts island officials and members of the public would rush to provide food and shelter for them. Isn’t that why Martha’s Vineyard has described itself as a “sanctuary” for migrants — because they intend to care for them? Sending migrants unannounced merely replicated in miniature the lack of cooperation federal officials show toward border towns (and the lack of cooperation sanctuary cities show toward federal immigration officials, for that matter) on a much bigger scale.
The airlift was only ever going to cause brief inconvenience and ruffle the balmy days of late summer for the vineyard’s rich inhabitants. There was no possibility of real hardship for anyone. There was no danger of migrants going hungry or being forced to endure harsh outdoor conditions. Did any of them die, as 750 have so far this year because Biden blithely ignores the disaster his abject nonpolicy has created at the southern border?
The Left also claims the migrants were lied to with promises of jobs and that the journey might aid their chances of legal status in America. If officials responsible tricked the migrants, as Biden did the Haitians, they should be punished. But it is not clear there were any lies. In fact, many of the migrants themselves told reporters they were grateful to have been given the opportunity to get on the flight. And if there was some sort of deception, it is far from clear that it was approved from on high rather than mere freelance untruths from individuals. Either way, does anyone really think migrants will be punished with legal jeopardy if they’ve been tricked? Hardly.
We can therefore dismiss notions that leftist rage over the Martha’s Vineyard gambit was based on principle, supposed cruelty, or legal chicanery. So, what was it?
It was, surely, that the political stunt — for it was a political stunt — worked so spectacularly well. Lefties can dish it — they love to — but they sure can’t take it when someone dishes it on them.
DeSantis’s political legerdemain is galling and utterly infuriating to the White House and other Democrats because it’s the kind of showy contrivance they like to reserve for themselves, such as when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) pretended to be arrested at an abortion rights rally on Capitol Hill in July.
Thus, when the migrant flights arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, “progressives” clutched their pearls, lifted their petticoats, and shrieked in horror. They said it was illegal, cruel, and dishonest. Hillary Clinton, always willing to go one worse than most others, denounced the flight to the exclusive vacation island as human trafficking. No epithet was too extreme.
But what they wouldn’t admit was that it was witty, clever, and effective. It deftly exposed the Democrats’ nimbyism about migrants. The airlift obliged a self-declared “sanctuary” jurisdiction to deal very briefly in practice with what it espouses in preening moral theory.
The busing of illegal immigrants from Arizona and Texas in the run-up to the midterm elections, as well as the flight organized by Florida, have drawn national attention to the utter folly and hypocrisy of Biden’s handling of border security. They have exposed the fact that the Left feels nothing but complacency when the howling failure of Democratic immigration policy is confined to flyover red states, yet this failure supposedly becomes a grotesque moral outrage when it is very briefly visited upon upper-class, blue-state enclaves.
The Biden administration has finally released August numbers of encounters with immigrants crossing illegally into the U.S. There have now been more than 2 million, a record, and there is still one more month of the fiscal year to go.
The president, the Democrats, the virtue-signaling rich, and the wider Left don’t bat an eyelid over those 2 million or over the betrayal of democracy that their unchecked arrival involves. But they treat just 50 migrants landing in the chichi monoculture of Martha’s Vineyard as though it were an irruption like the Normandy landings on D-Day.
This is brazen hypocrisy at its worst — perhaps even the kind that tends to stick with voters long after the media move on and the disgruntled residents of Martha’s Vineyard are allowed to return to their normal, sheltered lives.
