Migrant Busing Turned Out to Be a Political Coup for Republicans

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 11, 2023

 

Who would have thought that, for the low, low price of a bus ticket, you could compel your political opponents to make the very arguments against unchecked illegal immigration that you’ve been making for years? Apparently, the Republican governors of Texas and Florida, among others — though even they probably couldn’t have imagined what a spectacular political success their respective migrant-relocation programs would be.

 

We have “reached our limit,” said a spokesman for New York City mayor Eric Adams on Wednesday evening. The city has been compelled to engage in emergency measures including requisitioning gyms to house the number of migrants seeking asylum in the Big Apple. But with over 61,000 migrants descending on the city in the last year, New York is out of contingency plans. The mayor’s office revealed last night that it would suspend its policy of guaranteeing the “right to shelter” to migrants crossing America’s southern border.

 

Officially, the rationale justifying New York City’s reluctant decision to temporarily abandon its sanctuary policies is the expiration of the pandemic-era border restrictions contained within Title 42. But as the New York Times confessed, the relatively modest volume of migrants relocated to the city via programs pursued by red-state governors such as Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott have focused the minds of the city’s policy-makers. And it’s not just New York City that’s feeling the heat.

 

On Tuesday, outgoing Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot declared a state of emergency amid the influx of thousands of migrants that has overwhelmed the city’s social services. “We’ve reached a breaking point in our response to this humanitarian crisis,” Lightfoot said. Immigrants are reportedly forced to sleep on the floors of police stations and have limited access to showers and sanitation facilities. Chicago, too, has been compelled to rethink its sanctuary policies in response to the sunsetting of Title 42, but Lightfoot herself confessed that the city’s “breaking point” was accelerated by the migrant-busing program.

 

Washington, D.C. has already spent the $10 million set aside to help its migrant population, and the hotel space Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration blocked out to house immigrants is full. The city is now seeking reimbursement from FEMA to maintain its support for migrants. Last year, in response to the pressure the border states had imposed on the nation’s capital, the city pared back its sanctuary policies in a move the Georgetown Voice called “anti-immigrant.”

 

Both Lightfoot and Adams lashed out at the governors representing border states. “Not only is this behavior morally bankrupt and devoid of any concern for the well-being of asylum seekers,” Adams said in a statement, “but it is also impossible to ignore the fact that Abbott is now targeting five cities run by Black mayors.” Lightfoot struck a similarly accusatory note. “We’re not just warehousing people,” she insisted. “We’re not gonna treat them in the same way that we’ve seen Governor Abbott do, without any regard for their humanity.” But the busing programs have contributed only modestly to the increase in both cities’ migrant populations. And if that increase is enough to break these “sanctuary cities,” imagine what border communities are facing.

 

This isn’t the first time these mayors have articulated essentially the same arguments that Republican border hawks have been making.

 

“This is not a new challenge at the border,” Lightfoot confessed in September 2022 after a collection of red-state governors set out to disprove Vice President Kamala Harris’s absurd contention that “the border is secure.” It is, however, “a new challenge for us,” Lightfoot added. Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker called out the National Guard to meet the modest pressure that had sent his state “unnecessarily scrambling.” As a stopgap measure, Lightfoot shuttled nearly 150 migrants onto buses and sent them packing from her “sanctuary” city into the confines of the suburbs.

 

The story is much the same in D.C., where one city councilmember complained that Republican governors had “turned us into a border town.” Eric Adams was equally distressed. “The city’s prior practices, which never contemplated the busing of thousands of people into New York City, must be reassessed,” he confessed last year. These Democratic city officials did their best to tee up the reliable effect of negative partisanship by accusing Republicans of being heartless and opportunistic, but it didn’t work.

 

Within short order, Governors Abbott and DeSantis were joined by Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis. “We refuse to keep people against their will if they desire to travel elsewhere,” Polis said in a statement. Though his state’s relocation program has since ended, his decision to implement it complicated a nascent Democratic effort to polarize the issue.

 

The underlying conditions fueling this interstate dispute — the crisis at the border — are only getting worse. On Wednesday, Border Patrol agents reported encounters with over 10,000 migrants, the third day in a row on which encounters had passed that mark. And with the conditions worsening, the migrant-busing programs are set to intensify. “Until Biden secures the border to stop the inflow of mass migration, Texas will continue this necessary program,” Texas governor Abbott wrote at the beginning of May. Earlier this year, the Florida legislature passed, and Governor DeSantis signed, a bill funding and expanding the state’s migrant-relocation program. Florida’s Division of Emergency Management confirmed this week that the state has “selected multiple vendors based on their capabilities to carry out the program.”

 

The hardships experienced by the migrants who flood across America’s borders and the municipalities tasked with keeping them sheltered, fed, and safe are not evenly endured. The busing program has rendered America’s border crisis a far more visible nightmare by exposing the nation’s political and media professionals to it. In objecting to their treatment by the border states, Democratic lawmakers in America’s most permissive municipalities are inadvertently popularizing the case against lax immigration policies. If that becomes a catalyst for political change, it will have done more for the security of America’s borders and the migrants already inside them than any “sanctuary city” policy ever could.