FORT WORTH, Texas – Chicago became the latest northern city to feel a little of the Texas heat last week.
Two busloads of migrants, containing roughly 75 people, reached the streets of the Windy City on Wednesday.
Chicago joined Washington, D.C., and New York City as a third destination now offered to migrants picked up along Texas’ southern border – part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s political strategy for dealing with the massive increase in illegal border crossings.
Abbott’s migrant busing strategy, which sends willing migrants to northern “sanctuary cities,” has been the source of much consternation.
Some conservatives even have expressed the “ickiness” of so brazen a political troll – especially one in which the lives and sufferings of real people are in play.
“These are human beings,” said Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, upon greeting the several dozen migrants who arrived in Chicago last week.
She isn’t wrong about that.
Political stunts involving vulnerable people are seldom a good look, even for a governor who has unfairly found his state at the mercy of an absentee federal government and decades of failed immigration policy.
But Lightfoot stopped being right when she went on to claim that the border crisis was “manufactured” by Abbott – a fiction asserted by New York Mayor Eric Adams, as well.
She continued her specious claims, calling Abbott’s actions amoral and rhetorically comparing his migrant busing strategy to the work of a coyote. Yet she said nothing about the federal government’s role in this mess.
Lightfoot knows that this crisis is by no means manufactured.
There is no question that the crush of humanity crossing America’s southern border has been at crisis levels for years, straining border towns, endangering the citizens who live there and overwhelming the organizations that provide migrants services upon arrival.
Lightfoot’s city is caring for only 75 migrants — not 750 a day for months on end.
The migrant crisis has forced Texas, for better or worse, to take matters – which are the sole responsibility of the federal government – into its own hands.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to know if Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s $4 billion immigration enforcement strategy, is having any impact.
Some advocates, like state Sen. Kelly Hancock, point to the increase in felony charges and fentanyl seizures as evidence of its deterrent effect.
But with border apprehensions at record highs, approaching 2 million in the first 10 months of the fiscal year, even he conceded to the Dallas Morning News that “it would be much more successful if we could work together [with the federal government].”
That, of course, is the rub.
To the extent that this crisis was manufactured, that credit goes to the Biden administration, which instead of seeking to deter illegal migrants and secure the southern border, has demonized Border Patrol agents and offered migrants de facto amnesty.
That has undoubtedly incentivized more people to make the harrowing journey north, one that untold numbers do not survive.
Where’s the morality in that?
Yet, Lightfoot seems to equate “a more than 12 hour journey across a country that they don’t know” on a charter bus commissioned by the state, to the journey of several months on foot, through jungles and across rivers, often led by unscrupulous human smugglers. Again, her comparisons are off.
Of course, morality is a relative concept for progressive leaders like Lightfoot and Adams, who accuse Abbott of inhumanity yet ignore how their own political party’s immigration policy failings have created a permanent underclass of U.S. residents forever destined to live in the shadows.
Indeed, illegal immigration may be appealing when jobs are plentiful, but when the labor market is tight, a glut of cheap labor can reduce real wages for low-wage workers, legal immigrants and undocumented workers alike.
And undocumented persons, because of their reticence to seek help from law enforcement authorities, are more vulnerable to all manner of criminal elements – from cartel gangs to human and sex trafficking.
There is nothing moral about creating an environment in which such misery – even if it is safely inside the U.S. border – can flourish.
Abbott’s move may be too cute by half, but the Texas governor is not the villain here.
And mayors like Lightfoot and Adams would do better directing their ire and indignation not at Texas but at Washington.
