Let’s start with the proposition that with the lowest unemployment rate since those statistics have been reported, no one is losing jobs because of any influx of migrants, even as most undocumented migrants to the United States are sent back across the border anyway. Let’s add that fact that there is a severe shortage of affordable childcare workers due to low pay, alternative job opportunities, and our dramatic departure from the norms of other developed nations that do provide genuine subsidized childcare to their residents. We also need workers in the fields to harvest crops that often rot for lack of migrants that once performed those backbreaking tasks. Every time we have tried to induce U.S. citizens to perform the low-pay, physically demanding work done by immigrants who have crossed our southern border, those jobs remain unfilled. Reality! And still our elected leaders complain… but refuse to pass the needed legislation. Americans are losing out at every level.
Busses recently sent from Texas dumped misled immigrants, legally and legitimately in the U.S. as bona fide asylum seekers, into New York City, to Biden’s home state of Delaware and even to Washington, D.C. near the Vice President’s residence. This was but one small part of a pattern of GOP efforts, led by Governors Doug Ducey (Arizona), Greg Abbott (Texas) and Ron DeSantis (Florida) in open collusion with each other, to move asylum-seekers, those qualified and protected under an international treaty signed by the United States years ago, from red states to big cities in blue states. Unfortunately for the governors, immigration policy under our Constitution, rests with the federal government, not the states. But then, as we have seen repeatedly, the Constitution is merely an inconvenience to those with more autocratic goals and values.
“Florida's Republican governor on Friday [9/16] defended his decision to fly dozens of migrants [from Venezuela, a socialist dictatorship] to the wealthy vacation island of Martha's Vineyard from Texas, and said similar actions could follow as a political dispute over border security deepened in the run-up to U.S. elections in November… DeSantis claimed credit for a pair of chartered flights on Wednesday [9/15] that carried around 50 migrants to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, as part of a broader Republican effort to shift responsibility for border crossers to Democratic leaders.
“At a news conference in Daytona Beach, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blamed Democratic President Joe Biden for what he portrayed as a failure to stop migrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, as a record 1.8 million have been arrested this fiscal year… DeSantis said the Florida Legislature set aside $12 million to transport migrants out of the state and that his government would likely use the funds ‘to protect Florida.’… ‘There may be more flights, there may be buses,’ he said to cheers and applause from backers in the crowd.” Reuters, Sept. 16th.
A Florida governor sending migrants from Texas to Massachusetts is not game playing? Millions of Florida taxpayer dollars to move people to and from states that have nothing to do with Florida? For persons legally in the United States? Oh, and Massachusetts welcomed the misled migrants and provided immediate food and shelter. Like blue states don’t have migrant border issues too? Welcome to California and New Mexico! They aren’t sending busses to red states!!! But they are open to provide abortion services to those women denied in red states!
Could DeSantis’ effort also be criminal human trafficking? Or worse, given that these migrants were lied to when they were recruited to travel, could it actually be kidnapping? “Whoever, without lawful authority, forcibly or secretly confines or imprisons another person within this commonwealth against his will, or forcibly carries or sends such person out of this commonwealth, or […] kidnaps another person, with intent either to cause him to be secretly confined or imprisoned in this commonwealth against his will, or to cause him to be sent out of this commonwealth against his will or in any way held to service against his will…” Massachusetts General Laws chapter 265 section 26. Courts have interpreted fraudulent inducement to cause transportation as enough.
At least, DeSantis faces a civil lawsuit: Those Venezuelan legal migrants flown to the upscale Martha's Vineyard sued Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his transportation secretary in federal court in Boston on September 20th, for engaging in a “fraudulent and discriminatory scheme” to relocate them… The lawsuit says that that the migrants were told they were going to Boston or Washington, “which was completely false,” and were induced with perks such as $10 McDonald's gift certificates. Plus, such abusive treatment of asylum seekers almost assures their being granted legal residence.
Nevertheless, Congress has shot down one immigration bill after another; the last major reform occurred decades ago during the Reagan administration. Republicans have even voted down proposals from their own GOP presidents. We desperately need a guest-worker provision, to deal with the DACA kids, to bolster our Border Patrol with more staffing and to develop a viable asylum/path to a green card and even citizenship.
As nations that did not generate big migrant issues in the past – recently Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela – add people to the mix, Republicans claim (DeSantis above) the Biden administration is offering nothing more than an open door to the undocumented. Somehow, that the Biden administration routinely expels 100,000 of these undocumented per month, gets ignored in a flurry of convenient but wildly inaccurate myths, promulgated by GOP bigwigs vying for Trump endorsements or a shot at the presidency.
That these efforts to remake federal immigration law, without any clear mandate from a Congress that refuses to deal with this nightmare, represent the worst of the worst, cruel and manipulative inhumanity, from a nation of immigrants, one that violently displaced indigenous peoples to take their land. It is remarkable that the purportedly Christian values of tolerance, charity, kindness and non-judgmentalism are now considered morally objectionable “woke” beliefs, a position embraced by a vast cadre of evangelical preachers who must find the New Testament an inconvenient truth… or perhaps a menu from which they can pick and choose.
America has long since lost the moral high ground in the eyes of most of the world. But if we do not change our ways, we move from being an open democracy to joining that assemblage of pariah nations seeking illiberalism, autocracy if you will, as the only path forward for the United States. Is this what made America great? Is this the course to make America great again?
I’m Peter Dekom, and we face too many religious leaders who find the Bible to be an inconvenient truth and GOP candidates and elected officials who find the Constitution to be an inconvenient speed bump.
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