The Problem
Today, I'm going to write a couple of long things that call a lot of people dumb. I do a better job with these kinds of things when I just write them right off when it hits me to do it, and I've been putting this one off a bit. But I really do want to put this out there, so I'm just going to go ahead and do it.
The thesis: Americans are really dumb about immigration. We're dumb and insular and paranoid. We've ignored our own origins -- the people I've known who hate immigration the most are all second- or third-generation Americans whose grandparents passed easily through Ellis Island without any kind of visa. We've forgotten the whole point of the American experiment. Those of us who claim moral superiority based on a spurious attachment to a contorted form of Christianity have devolved into race-based nationalists. We've needlessly handcuffed the economy because we don't understand how much capitalism depends on the constant flow of new labor that birth rates can't sustain. In a couple of words, we're stoopid. You can see it in these signs on a protest fence in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood. "We are uneasy and scared." And, well ... God forbid you be uneasy!
"Say, Clint," You might be saying. "You've ranted on about versions of this before. What's the deal, now?"
Well, friends, here's the problem, and it starts with the moron governor of Texas.
Greg Abbott was elected Texas governor after a long stint as the state's attorney general that focused mainly on important issues like banning sex toys and encouraging large corporations to physically harm as many people as possible. He's been a big supporter of Trump and has sung all of MAGA's greatest hits, and he absolutely hates brown people. His state has a long border with Mexico, and he hates the idea that people cross it, even refugees who have a legal right to seek asylum under the laws of the United States. He'd shoot them all if he could. He's placed barriers in the Rio Grande to drown people trying to cross. He's put Texas National Guard soldiers along the river and ordered them to force men, women, and children gasping for air back into the water. He's a huge anti-abortion guy who loves life so much that he'll kill a woman to prove it, but he loves watching brown kids die.
He's also big on stunt, and for the last year or so, his big stunt has been to grab as many of the people who've made it across the federal border into Texas territory as he can, load them up onto rickety, unregulated buses and ship them all to liberal northern cities he doesn't like. Chicago has been a big target on the MAGA radar for years, so a lot of those buses are running up I-57, where they dump a few hundred refugee immigrants on some random street in the middle of the night and leave them all to figure it out. Abbott could have the buses drop them off at some central processing location and let the city know they're coming and when, but what's the fun in that? That wouldn't be cruel enough, so he just dumps them in random spots, and everybody has to scramble to figure it out on the fly. The city's tried mandating that the buses follow an actual procedure, and the city council recently passed an ordinance allowing them to impound buses that drop the migrants outside a specific location. They nabbed one bus and found the bus driver didn't have a drivers license. Texas responded by flying 90-someodd migrants up here on a private plane and dumping them in a random hangar. The "handlers" ducked out in an uber before the cops showed up.
According to the internet, between August of 2022 and the start of this month, December of 2023, the Greg Abbott buses have dumped 21,700 refugees on the streets of Chicago. (This seems hugely counterproductive if you're looking at this from a xenophobe's standpoint, because now you've got 21,700 people you don't want in the country 1,500 miles from the Mexican border. They could go anywhere.) As of the end of October, this program has cost the taxpayers of state of Texas -- which still hasn't figured out how electricity works -- about $75 million. Switching over to planes will pump that up fast.
But here's the thing about this whole Greg Abbott deal: he accidentally kind of has point.
He has his point for stupid, racist, xenophobic reasons, and he's making his point with as much inhumane cruelty as he can manage. He mostly just wants to troll Chicago mayors Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and US President Joe Biden. But he's trolling them with a point.
Immigration is a federal issue, and it is up to the federal government to handle it with federal resources. It's unfair to place the financial burden of this issue on any one state, but the states along the southern border with Mexico -- Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California -- have borne the brunt of the cost. The federal government, meanwhile, has been running a wildly haphazard border immigration policy for decades, and has never managed to figure out a logical, reasonable system for processing people. It really needs to do this. In a best-case scenario, the feds would take this thing over and run it themselves at the border crossings. At the very least, they need to supply federal money to cover the states' cost.
But the feds won't do that, and politicians like Greg Abbott are the reason why. People like Greg Abbott don't want to solve the problem. Their only solution is simply to shut the door. Build a wall, put up a bunch of barbed wire, drown people in the river and shoot whoever makes it across, and that is no solution. People have a right codified in American law to seek asylum, and we need a rational process to allow these people in. More than that, the continued success of this nation absolutely depends on new people coming in. But Congress -- where Republicans reign in the House -- would never authorize any such system. And so we're frozen, impotent, unable as a nation to act. So Greg Abbott will just keep up his human trafficking, keep using Texas money to put people on crap buses and planes, and dumping them in the night.
The Problem
Today, I'm going to write a couple of long things that call a lot of people dumb. I do a better job with these kinds of things when I just write them right off when it hits me to do it, and I've been putting this one off a bit. But I really do want to put this out there, so I'm just going to go ahead and do it.
The thesis: Americans are really dumb about immigration. We're dumb and insular and paranoid. We've ignored our own origins -- the people I've known who hate immigration the most are all second- or third-generation Americans whose grandparents passed easily through Ellis Island without any kind of visa. We've forgotten the whole point of the American experiment. Those of us who claim moral superiority based on a spurious attachment to a contorted form of Christianity have devolved into race-based nationalists. We've needlessly handcuffed the economy because we don't understand how much capitalism depends on the constant flow of new labor that birth rates can't sustain. In a couple of words, we're stoopid. You can see it in these signs on a protest fence in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood. "We are uneasy and scared." And, well ... God forbid you be uneasy!
"Say, Clint," You might be saying. "You've ranted on about versions of this before. What's the deal, now?"
Well, friends, here's the problem, and it starts with the moron governor of Texas.
Greg Abbott was elected Texas governor after a long stint as the state's attorney general that focused mainly on important issues like banning sex toys and encouraging large corporations to physically harm as many people as possible. He's been a big supporter of Trump and has sung all of MAGA's greatest hits, and he absolutely hates brown people. His state has a long border with Mexico, and he hates the idea that people cross it, even refugees who have a legal right to seek asylum under the laws of the United States. He'd shoot them all if he could. He's placed barriers in the Rio Grande to drown people trying to cross. He's put Texas National Guard soldiers along the river and ordered them to force men, women, and children gasping for air back into the water. He's a huge anti-abortion guy who loves life so much that he'll kill a woman to prove it, but he loves watching brown kids die.
He's also big on stunt, and for the last year or so, his big stunt has been to grab as many of the people who've made it across the federal border into Texas territory as he can, load them up onto rickety, unregulated buses and ship them all to liberal northern cities he doesn't like. Chicago has been a big target on the MAGA radar for years, so a lot of those buses are running up I-57, where they dump a few hundred refugee immigrants on some random street in the middle of the night and leave them all to figure it out. Abbott could have the buses drop them off at some central processing location and let the city know they're coming and when, but what's the fun in that? That wouldn't be cruel enough, so he just dumps them in random spots, and everybody has to scramble to figure it out on the fly. The city's tried mandating that the buses follow an actual procedure, and the city council recently passed an ordinance allowing them to impound buses that drop the migrants outside a specific location. They nabbed one bus and found the bus driver didn't have a drivers license. Texas responded by flying 90-someodd migrants up here on a private plane and dumping them in a random hangar. The "handlers" ducked out in an uber before the cops showed up.
According to the internet, between August of 2022 and the start of this month, December of 2023, the Greg Abbott buses have dumped 21,700 refugees on the streets of Chicago. (This seems hugely counterproductive if you're looking at this from a xenophobe's standpoint, because now you've got 21,700 people you don't want in the country 1,500 miles from the Mexican border. They could go anywhere.) As of the end of October, this program has cost the taxpayers of state of Texas -- which still hasn't figured out how electricity works -- about $75 million. Switching over to planes will pump that up fast.
But here's the thing about this whole Greg Abbott deal: he accidentally kind of has point.
He has his point for stupid, racist, xenophobic reasons, and he's making his point with as much inhumane cruelty as he can manage. He mostly just wants to troll Chicago mayors Lori Lightfoot and Brandon Johnson, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and US President Joe Biden. But he's trolling them with a point.
Immigration is a federal issue, and it is up to the federal government to handle it with federal resources. It's unfair to place the financial burden of this issue on any one state, but the states along the southern border with Mexico -- Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California -- have borne the brunt of the cost. The federal government, meanwhile, has been running a wildly haphazard border immigration policy for decades, and has never managed to figure out a logical, reasonable system for processing people. It really needs to do this. In a best-case scenario, the feds would take this thing over and run it themselves at the border crossings. At the very least, they need to supply federal money to cover the states' cost.
But the feds won't do that, and politicians like Greg Abbott are the reason why. People like Greg Abbott don't want to solve the problem. Their only solution is simply to shut the door. Build a wall, put up a bunch of barbed wire, drown people in the river and shoot whoever makes it across, and that is no solution. People have a right codified in American law to seek asylum, and we need a rational process to allow these people in. More than that, the continued success of this nation absolutely depends on new people coming in. But Congress -- where Republicans reign in the House -- would never authorize any such system. And so we're frozen, impotent, unable as a nation to act. So Greg Abbott will just keep up his human trafficking, keep using Texas money to put people on crap buses and planes, and dumping them in the night.