Blue States and Migrants

I have to give Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and these other assholes a tiny bit of credit. See, they know that liberals are really pretty much as racist as they are, but the liberals don’t want to admit that. So by sending migrants north into blue cities, it forces these cities and these people to deal with a sudden expansion of people they don’t want. It’s real easy to support immigration from New York, but those New Yorkers don’t actually want another influx of immigrants. It’s a sad state of affairs, but the response of New York to this has pretty much confirmed what DeSantis and Abbott thought in the first place.

Since tens of thousands of migrants began arriving in New York City last year, the administration of Mayor Eric Adams has searched for one place after another to house them: hotels, parking lots, a cruise ship terminal and a pair of giant tents on Randall’s Island among them. Almost every idea has caused an uproar.

Now, the daily stream of migrants feeding the crisis has doubled in size in recent weeks, city officials say. As many as 700 migrants are arriving each day in the city — up from less than half that number since the expiration last Thursday of Title 42, a Trump-era policy that allowed immigration officials to expel some border crossers back to Mexico.

With no clear solutions at hand, the city turned to shelter some migrants in public school gyms starting last week. That plan, like many others before it, was almost immediately met with outrage — not only from activists and human rights groups, but also from public school parents and the ranks of everyday New Yorkers.

On Wednesday, the city began to distance itself from that proposal, too.

More than 67,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the crisis began. Of those, 41,500 people are currently being cared for by the city, Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, said at a news conference on Wednesday. She said 4,300 people had arrived in just the past week.

That new influx of arrivals has forced the Adams administration to contend with new layers of what was already a humanitarian and economic crisis that the city had spent $1 billion addressing so far, and may cost as much as $4.3 billion through June 2024, according to Ms. Williams-Isom. It has strained Mr. Adams’s relationship with not only New Yorkers but with President Biden.

Last week, thousands of migrants converged on the border ahead of Title 42’s end, but crossings have been significantly down in the past week. Border officials are still processing migrants who have been in custody for days; as of Wednesday, the Border Patrol was holding migrants in custody for about four-and-a-half days, on average. More than 3,800 migrants were released on Wednesday with an immigration court summons.

Mr. Biden has been criticized over his response to immigration by Republicans and Democrats alike in recent weeks, including by Mr. Adams, who said last month that the president had “failed” the city. The Biden administration has moved to restrict the flow of migrants, with new limits on who can apply for asylum in the United States. That would make it all but impossible for many people to qualify if they hadn’t applied for asylum elsewhere.

The arrival of migrants has tested left-leaning cities around the country in particular. In addition to New York, many of the migrants are ending up in places like Chicago, Denver and Washington, D.C., where leaders have sought to emphasize that they are welcome, while at the same time warning that the large numbers of newcomers are straining services.

Yeah, this is how it works. If you believe in human rights, it requires work to make that happen. It’s real easy to put that “This Home Believes in Science” or “We Strive to Be Radically Inclusive” yard signs up. But what happens when 20,000 poor people from Venezuela, Guatemala, and El Salvador show up in town? Oh well, that’s different. What if we see them? And, my god, what happens if they flood our good schools! I am concerned for Maddie and Connor here.

Now, obviously I am being provocative here. But I point out again that the real work many Democratic voters are willing to put in to these issues is actually very small. Too many want to think of themselves as good tolerant people, but that has very sharp limitations and this migrant “issue” is one very good example. Fundamentally, I believe that most white liberals have deep-seated racism that they refuse to face and when they are forced to, they get angry as they are in New York. Eric Adams is a schmuck and an asshole, but the fact that anything he does to find space for these migrants leads to outrage in one of the nation’s bluest states says plenty.

As for me, I say again to open the borders and let them come in. How much did the U.S. benefit from having open borders in the late 19th century? A lot. In fact, it basically built this nation as a modern enterprise. Despite some initial difficulties, the upside for the country is enormous. Every day, there are more stories about a worker shortage. And if diversity is good, then let’s open the empty schools, hotels, everything else and welcome these immigrants. Let’s raise our taxes to support them.

Yeah, as if that is going to happen in Rhode Island or Vermont or Oregon or any other state.

Give us your tired and poor so long as there are only 12 of them.