Texas’ GOP leaders have a sadistic penchant for booting out immigrant families on holidays. Last Christmas, Governor Greg Abbott bussed and dumped migrant families in the freezing cold in Washington, D.C. This past Valentine’s Day, Texas Senator Drew Springer filed SB 923, delivering on Abbott’s reelection campaign goal to deny undocumented children access to public education—unless the federal government pays. The bill is now in the Senate Education Committee.
From bussing migrants and executing Operation Lone Star to building Texas’ own border wall and, now, to his efforts forcing out undocumented children from public schools, Abbott has been attempting to one-up President Joe Biden and the Democrats to show he can do a better job enforcing federal immigration laws than the federal government. He has framed his political stunts as a genuine effort to deal with the “unsustainable and unaffordable” burden of illegal immigration on the American people. Democrats and the mainstream liberal media have reacted by offering a cost-benefit analysis of immigration. But in doing so, they have fallen into Abbott’s political ploy that makes the problem about the costs of immigration instead of about the state’s plan to abandon its responsibility to provide basic services like public education to all Texans.
Democrats and mainstream liberal media outlets like The New York Times and the Dallas Morning News have fallen for Abbott’s divisive tactics that pits us against one another by narrowing the problem to just an immigrant issue. On one hand, Abbott argues that undocumented children and their families are a burden on our society. On the other, the Dallas Morning News lauded the economic benefits that migrant children would provide to Texas in the future. That is just code for saying migrant children are good for the economy because they would provide a steady source of cheap, exploitable labor in the future. Such an argument traps us in a rhetorical feedback loop and fuels the right-wing shibboleth of blaming immigrants for stealing our jobs and resources. Such misguided thinking steers us to fight each other for inadequate resources and services while the plutocrats of our society, aided by the state, rob from us each day.
