Like a joke that becomes less funny with each telling, dispatching busloads or planeloads of immigrants to the doorsteps of various limousine liberals will soon reach the point of diminishing returns.
It should go without saying that any coercion or deception employed to expedite their transport is wrong. But that deception begins with the moral hazard created by the sparsely guarded border and selectively enforced laws.
And if we are going to leave the golden door ajar, the obligations to care for those who enter cannot be borne solely on the basis of a community’s proximity to the border.
That is the point Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Greg Abbott (R-TX) are attempting to make, even if some are trying extremely hard to pretend they do not understand.
When the surge of illegal immigration began at the southern border shortly after President Joe Biden took office, the White House conceded, however reluctantly, that it was at least partially in response to the migration policy messages they sent.
“Surges tend to respond to hope, and there was a significant hope for a more humane policy after four years of, you know, pent-up demand,” Ambassador Robert Jacobson, who was then the coordinator for the southern border, told reporters at a White House press briefing on March 10, 2021. “So I don’t know whether I would call that a coincidence, but I certainly think that the idea that a more humane policy would be in place may have driven people to make that decision.”
Biden and his deputies sent millions of people the message that they could cross the border and possibly not be turned away. If they were accompanied by minors or made it deep enough into the interior of the United States, there was a reasonable chance they would be permitted to remain.
The immigration controls put in place by the “previous administration” were gradually lifted. A 100-day deportation moratorium was swiftly proposed. An immigration plan that offered legal status to a majority of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. was unveiled.
At least 1.66 million people were arrested illegally entering the country in 2021. That number is set to surpass 2 million this year. Pent-up demand, indeed.
“I want to be clear: Neither in this — neither this announcement nor any of the other measures suggest that anyone, especially children and families with young children, should make the dangerous trip to try and enter the U.S. in an irregular fashion,” Jacobson said. “The border is not open.”
That part of the Biden administration’s message has been anything but clear, and it makes White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s complaints about “repeated attempts by these Republican officials to create chaos and confusion at the border” a little hard to take.
Jean-Pierre on Friday presented the millions of Border Patrol apprehensions themselves as an immigration enforcement success story rather than a sign of the border’s brokenness, repeating what the “Biden-Harris administration has been doing since day one, including on the first day of putting forth a comprehensive immigration reform to deal with this issue.”
That would be an amnesty, however conditional, for the vast majority of illegal immigrants. The promise of that policy is attracting immigrants to Texas communities right now, and its delivery was tried before as far back as 1986 without success.
When large urban centers such as New York City, which advertise themselves as sanctuary cities, already house large immigrant communities and have vast social welfare budgets that are overwhelmed by the redirection of some of these new immigrants to their jurisdictions, what hope should random Texas border towns have?
When Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, is a fearsome destination for 50 people, what happens when 50,000 people find themselves in less affluent areas, sometimes living underneath highway underpasses?
“We’re not a border town,” said Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser. “We don’t have an infrastructure to handle this type of and level of immigration to our city. … We’re not Texas.”
What magical properties does Texas possess? Why are immigration policies supposed to benefit Martha’s Vineyard and Kalorama Heights at the expense of El Paso?
The editorial boards speaking of these immigrants as “so much refuse to be deposited without notice” and activists comparing DeSantis’s maneuver to “me taking my trash out and just driving to different areas where I live and just throwing my trash there” may mean to characterize their ideological foes’ motives, but they are telling on themselves.
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Biden is responding to activists who decried his former boss, President Barack Obama, as the “deporter-in-chief” and chant, “No borders, no nations, stop deportations.” He is listening to the vanquished Democratic primary opponents who wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossings and the reporters whose questions make no distinction between refugees and illegal immigrants.
Without the capacity to care for the human beings who come, semi-open borders lead to totally empty promises.
