For nearly three years, Gov. Abbott's nationalized the costs suffered by Border State Residents – his bussing of illegal immigrants has been the most successful policy in memory
By Scott McKayWalter Samuel, a pseudonym for “a prolific international affairs writer and academic,” penned a quite interesting piece for the website of AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens (perhaps best described as the conservative version of AARP) last week. Samuel’s topic was “How The Migrant Crisis Destroyed American Liberalism,” and it was a pretty good summation of the catastrophic political damage that Joe Biden’s border invasion policy is wrecking.
Samuel writes:
When history is written, the decision of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who was widely mocked by the mainstream media when he announced it in 2021, to bus migrants from the border into blue-state sanctuary cities may be remembered as one of the most momentous in modern history. It was definitely among the most politically clever.
Over nearly three years, Abbott’s decision effectively nationalized the costs of an issue that had previously only produced localized winners and losers – border state residents paid the costs of mass illegal migration while blue state residents far from the border enjoyed cheap labor and the chance to be morally righteous.
For all Democrats like to talk about redistribution of resources and “privilege,” the bussing of migrants was the most successful redistributive policy in recent memory – one which has left Democrats with no answer.
One reason it succeeded was because it played on the class divisions that define American politics.
Modern American liberalism is less a collection of policy positions based on a worldview than an effort by individuals to demonstrate their own social status through demonstrating contempt toward those beneath them. Critics of the shift away from the basics of math, science, and reading, toward DEI and weird sexual education curricula in schools often miss that, for liberals, sending one’s children to a school that teaches gibberish rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic is in effect a method of demonstrating that your family is connected enough to ensure that your children can secure college admission and employment without the need to learn real skills.
That is why the inability of those graduates to secure employment or repay student loans is such an issue for Biden’s base. The ability to take useless degrees and succeed is intrinsic to their identity.
Immigration took on a similar tone. The ability to make high-minded moral proclamations such as “no human is illegal,” “walls are racist,” or “borders are illegitimate” advertised that those making such claims had the economic clout to build their own domestic walls to keep the consequences of their own ideology out of their communities.
“Well, I have never had a problem with migrants,” the liberal from suburban Boston would say, before noting how much harder Ecuadorians worked on their vacation home renovation than local Americans who were probably addicted to opioids. The ability to prioritize foreign illegal migrants over native workers implied that liberals were above both and in a position to pass judgment upon them. Support for open borders became a way to punish working-class Americans for failing to show adequate deference to their “betters.”
The policy of bussing migrants to sanctuary communities in blue states cleverly destroyed the basis of this ideological worldview. This was not merely by causing liberals to feel the pain in their communities – that was an element, and an effective one at that – but the assault went deeper.
This is true – as far as it goes. Samuel has it right that busing migrants to blue cities is transformative in the sense that, yes, it makes comfortable liberals and leftists, who thought they would pleasure themselves by virtue-signaling that they lived in “sanctuary cities,” uncomfortable.
But, at scale, it also defeats the border invasion at the heart of the motivation behind it.
Namely, that the point of opening the border to all comers – or, at least, a very large chunk of the point – is to turn Texas from red to blue.
And those buses of migrants from Texas to big blue cities in big blue states, at least at scale, would not only block Texas’ political transformation, but inflict the kind of political woe on the “sanctuary city” Left that the Biden border-invasion policy would inflict on Texas.
But here’s the problem: Those buses don’t represent scale. Not when they’re sending migrants to lots of destinations.
There are nowhere near enough migrants going to those cities to effect the kind of surrender we need. And, unfortunately, time isn’t on the side of those who would save the country from what the border invasion will do to education, health care, law enforcement, housing, crime, the environment, wages, culture, and politics if this invasion is not stopped and reversed.
Because the longer this continues without resolution, the worse it’s going to get in the halls of power in Washington, D.C.
Last week we had the rumblings of a “bipartisan” Senate bill that would supposedly provide “solutions” to the border invasion. It was the classic Failure Theater betrayal and surrender that the GOP’s discredited establishment can’t stop imposing on its own voters. A Breitbart piece outlined the contours of the plan:
1) Increase green cards by 50,000/year
2) Work permits for adult children of H-1B holders
3) Immediate work permits to every illegal alien released from custody
4) Taxpayer funded lawyers to certain UACs and mentally incompetent aliens
5) Expulsion authority for a limited number of days ONLY if encounters exceed 5k/day over a seven day period
6) Restricts parole for those who enter without authorization between ports of entry
To his credit, House Speaker Mike Johnson tweeted a defiant response. “Absolutely not,” he said.
Unfortunately, Johnson’s 219-vote majority in the House is a phantom one. It is not in evidence that he could stop a bargain such as the one Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla) – who, to be fair, is protesting, without a great deal of believable refutation, that his deal is much better than that which has been reported – and his patron, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are presenting in concert with Chuck Schumer and the Democrats, who are actively seeking to replace the current American electorate with the millions of migrants currently crossing the border.
Or, if not those migrants, then certainly their children.
The problem we have is that Washington is not listening. The Biden administration, which is drowning in disapproval from the American public, with this issue leading a panoply of causes, isn’t listening; likely because Joe Biden isn’t in control of that administration, and those who are clearly don’t fear his defeat enough to change course. Moreover, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are committed to going down with the Biden ship on immigration. You have to admire their Borg-like party loyalty, if not their patriotism or intelligence.
How does Cori Bush, representing the slums of St. Louis, continue bleating out the party line when illegals depress the wages and reduce the quality of life for her people? You’d think the pressure on schools, hospitals, the justice system, housing, and lots of other things that negatively affect the American poor as a direct result of a migrant invasion would turn Bush into a dissident within her own party. Instead, she’s whining about Gaza and demanding trans rights and Medicare for all – which would, one assumes, include all the migrants.
None of them are listening.
And McConnell and the Establishment GOP are still listening to the corporate open-borders crowd who clamor for as many cheap-labor-providing migrants as they can get.
They’re not listening. Even as their ridiculous presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, faces humiliation at the hands of the voting public in the coming primaries, they’re not listening.
It’s a few Senate Republicans and a decent number of House Republicans — but not enough for a congressional majority – and a goodly number of Republican governors and other statewide officials, and that’s about it in the political class who are listening.
We can’t even count on the “ultra-conservative” Supreme Court – which on Monday betrayed the country by ruling that a razor-wire fence set up along the Rio Grande by the state of Texas had to come down so that the Border Patrol could escort invaders into the country:
A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed Border Patrol agents to cut razor wire that Texas installed on the U.S.-Mexico border, while a lawsuit over the wire continues.
The justices, by a 5-4 vote, granted an emergency appeal from the Biden administration, which has been in an escalating standoff at the border with Texas and had objected to an appellate ruling in favor of the state.
The concertina wire along roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) of the Rio Grande near the border city of Eagle Pass is part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s broader fight with the administration over immigration enforcement.
Abbott also has authorized installing floating barriers in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass and allowed troopers to arrest and jail thousands of migrants on trespassing charges. The administration also is challenging those actions in federal court.
A federal appeals court last month forced federal agents to stop cutting the concertina wire. Large numbers of migrants have crossed at Eagle Pass in recent months.
Wonder why razor wire around the U.S. Capitol was constitutional with no showing of necessity, but razor wire to stop a border invasion is not. But I digress.
If this is how it’s going to be, then clearly the ruling class is much too comfortable within the prosperous confines of the Beltway – and that must change.
Abbott needs to stop busing migrants to Chicago, New York, Detroit, Denver, and other blue cities around the country and focus his itineraries on the one place that matters most.
Every single migrant who crosses into Texas ought to be collected and shipped to Washington, D.C.
Let the nation’s capital become the world’s largest migrant camp. Let the schools, hospitals, gymnasia, theaters, hotels, airports, train stations, police stations, fire stations, arenas, and government buildings be overrun with migrants to such an extent that nothing but their care can be accomplished. Turn every park in Washington into a tent city for Bolivians, Guatemalans, Chinese, and Pakistanis to litter, micturate, and defecate at their leisure within.
Shut down D.C. with illegal migrants. Bury it. Focus the suffering; trap it where the power brokers live. Make them so miserable that they scream for respite from the refugee camp their city has become.
Maybe then we’ll see some change.
What we know now is that the ruling class, the out-of-touch, insufferable elite who populate that place, won’t stop inflicting pain until it’s inflicted on them. And not enough is getting to them. So bring it right to their doorstep.
Now. Faster.
Scott McKay is a contributing editor at The American Spectator, and publisher of the Hayride, which offers news and commentary on Louisiana and national politics, and RVIVR.com, a national political news aggregation and opinion site.
