By Judson Berger
Friday, September 15, 2023
The ethos of the “In This House” yard signs is being
tested like never before.
You know the signs. They’re everywhere. They contain
statements that are meant to look defiant but are actually anodyne. They’ve
even inspired parodies. But porch posturing is one thing. Attempting to
carry out those sentiments at a government level is another.
“No human is illegal” has essentially been at the core of
the Democratic Party’s border approach since the latter Trump years.
Then–presidential candidate Julián Castro called for decriminalizing
unauthorized crossings in 2019, most of his rivals for the nomination joined him, and the party platform that cycle
made no mention of deportation as a legitimate enforcement
tool. Easing restrictions at the border, federally, and
broadcasting the message that cities would welcome all regardless of legal
status, locally, have since combined to create an earthquake that is now
forcing a fissure straight through the Democratic ranks.
“No human is illegal,” it turns out, is every bit as
unsustainable as “Defund the police” when translated into policy.
For mayors such as New York’s Eric Adams, the migrant
crisis gripping cities across America today has dramatically and probably
irreversibly changed the way they talk about immigration and the rules
governing it. For others, this moment is indeed a test of faith. As Brittany Bernstein reports, progressive pundits were
quick to compare Adams to Donald Trump (the phrase “black Trump” was used) and
condemn his “anti-immigrant” campaign; immigrant advocates voiced similar disappointment. More than 100 House Democrats signed a letter calling not for stricter border
measures but work permits.
New York is perhaps the most vivid example, for the time
being, of the strain the crisis is putting on cities — as
well as on the party platform — with the Adams administration having shifted
into full-blown-emergency mode in a matter of days. A little over a week ago,
the mayor gained national attention for warning that the influx of over 110,000
migrants since last year “will destroy New York City.” He previewed that agencies would face cuts to offset
the costs; City Hall swiftly announced that overtime pay for
police officers and other personnel would be on the chopping block.
New York is far from alone. New Jersey governor Phil
Murphy recently spoke out against the idea of relocating migrants from
NYC to the Atlantic City airport “or, frankly, elsewhere in the state.”
Massachusetts governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in
August, and the mayor of Woburn is now urging state lawmakers to
reform a “right-to-shelter” law, under strain from arriving migrant families.
Chicago is scrambling to move asylum-seekers into “winterized base camps” before the weather turns. Earlier
this year, the mayor of Denver warned the community could not
“continue to financially shoulder the burden of this humanitarian crisis
alone.”
It should be noted that the influx is only partly a
product of the controversial and widely covered decision by GOP governors to
send migrants to Democrat-run cities. The New York Times reports that Texas-funded buses have “sent about
34,740 migrants to other states since April of 2022,” a “paltry subset of the
hundreds of thousands who have crossed the border during that period, most of
whom have probably also made their way to destinations outside Texas,” though
migrants arriving on the buses may require more assistance than others.
Jim Geraghty, in surveying the unfortunate situation both
cities and immigrant families find themselves in, considers how we got to this point. As he notes, the United
States already surpasses every other nation in welcoming legal immigrants, and
it was never immoral or xenophobic to enforce basic immigration law:
All these Democratic lawmakers were
fine with insufficient border security and lax immigration enforcement, as long
as the associated problems were mostly contained to border states such as
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. . . . The sudden about-face by
these Democratic officeholders is a de facto confession that they didn’t really
think all that hard about the likely consequences of their policies.
Charlie Cooke’s take is further along on the pH scale: “Was their willingness to
serve as a ‘sanctuary’ only operative when they believed that nobody would show
up?”
Immigration being a federal responsibility, these mayors
and governors are escalating pressure on Washington to relieve their own —
making this, increasingly, a Biden problem, one that will be difficult to
downplay come the election year. Adams’s budget director complained in a memo that state and federal aid has
been “grossly inadequate.” Healey demanded a “national response.” While President Biden faces pressure from his left flank, House Freedom Caucusers
threaten a government shutdown if a funding package doesn’t include a
House-passed border-security measure. The administration reportedly is considering a way to force certain
migrants in Texas to stay there, an idea Governor Greg Abbott responded to by
threatening to send “even more buses” to Washington.
Yet, despite the White House claim that Biden “has done more to secure
the border, to deal with this issue of immigration, than anybody else,” it’s
not clear the president feels motivated to make that statement marginally less
refutable — especially now that an impeachment inquiry (not to mention the Hunter indictment) has the administration on a war footing.
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