Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to bus illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C., and leave them on the steps of Congress is one of those effective and amusing moves that, pointedly, is no joke.
It’s a deft political ping-pong shot returning the ball to President Joe Biden, who served the problem at Texas in the first place. As the Washington Examiner reported, Biden’s derelict immigration and border security policies hit Texas harder than anywhere. The state received more than half of the 2 million-plus illegals who crossed the southern border in 2021.
Abbott has 900 buses, capable with just one journey each of dropping some 4,500 migrants on Biden’s doorstep, although as no migrant will be forced to take the trip, the number will presumably be lower than that. Abbott placed blame accurately, saying, “We are sending them to the United States’s capital, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border.”
Biden is wholly to blame for the worsening border crisis, having invited migrants during his election campaign to head north, then stanched deportations even of criminal aliens, scuppered the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and restricted arrests. He is now repealing Title 42 so officials can’t turn migrants away under COVID protocols, making the problem yet worse.
Most presidents, including Barack Obama (dubbed the “deporter in chief” by his resentful left wing) drain much of the inflow of illegal immigrants back out of the country. But Biden’s policy is like one of those rivers that don’t flow to the sea but instead head inland and evaporate. The administration doesn’t drain illegal border crossers back where they came from but lets them leak into the U.S., disperse, and disappear into the general population.
Biden’s erasing of the southern border has also boosted drug smuggling, and law enforcement officials warn of spiking “fentanyl-related mass-overdose” deaths as Mexican drug cartels take advantage of our president’s misgovernance.
Much of this is going largely unnoticed. News coverage is mostly of the war in Ukraine, with the danger of lost American leadership, and on inflation, which is shriveling the dollars in your pocket by more than 7% a year. These are our preeminent immediate challenges, but we should not let them obscure the massive, continuous failure of Biden to control the border or formulate a sensible immigration policy.
The public doesn’t want illegal immigration, yet Biden will probably smash the record he set only last year. This is undemocratic — against both the law and the wishes of the people who elected him.
Abbott (and perhaps other governors) busing the problem to its origin in Washington, D.C., is political theater, but it is more than that. He is underscoring that Biden insouciantly imposed a crisis on states that cannot avoid them simply because of geography. The president turned blithely away from the mess he made, leaving it to others to handle. Now, one of them is trying appropriately to make him pay attention.
If hundreds or thousands of illegal migrants turn up in Washington, perhaps Biden will twig to the fact that it’s his problem and he must do something about it.
