Ron DeSantis Travel Agency – The American Conservative

So now we’re going to have a big argument over whether or not Gov. Ron DeSantis was right to fly planeloads of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. I think he was, but am getting huge pushback on that from some of my friends, and my Bernie Bro son. My dad must be up in heaven laughing his butt off, watching me argue with my righteous liberal college student son. I put him through the same thing when I was the same age as my boy, God love him.

The basic objection seems to be that DeSantis made political pawns out of these people. My argument is that he, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, are trying to make liberal elites understand the cost of their easy compassion. It’s like this:

I’d say that DeSantis has made his point, for exactly the reason that David Marcus identifies: he has made the liberals understand, in a way they haven’t before, what their cost-free compassion actually costs people like those who live in Del Rio.

Remember this declaration from the Mayor of Washington, DC?

Gov. Abbott has been honoring Mayor Bowser’s desire to open the city’s arms to illegal migrants, by shipping them to DC. But it turns out that for some reason, liberal DC politicians don’t actually want illegals to take sanctuary there. This DC Council member once celebrated the city as a sanctuary:

But now? She complains that the governors of Texas and Arizona have turned the sanctuary city into a “border town.” Nadeau was thrilled to be a sanctuary city when it didn’t cost much, but not now.

Greg Abbott did it again, this time at VP Harris’s home. Why? Again, to make an important point:

“Our supposed Border Czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, has yet to even visit the border to see firsthand the impact of the open border policies she has helped implement,” Abbott said in a press release. “Texas will continue sending migrants to sanctuary cities like Washington, D.C. until President Biden and Border Czar Harris step up and do their jobs.”

“The border is secure,” Harris insisted to Meet the Press host Chuck Todd in a recent interview.

Some critics say that DeSantis et alia are owning the libs at the expense of desperate human beings. Well, those desperate human beings are in far less danger being dumped in a fancy liberal resort town than at any other point in their journey from their home countries, in which they chose to break the laws of the United States to enter. There are plenty of people near the borders of America who are tired of bearing the burden, financial and otherwise, of open illegal immigration. Nothing meaningful has been done about the problem as long as that burden has been concentrated in a few border states. Now those states’ governors are trying something new to compel liberals to understand what they have been dealing with. I see nothing wrong with that.

It is a standard, and well-founded, conservative complaint that liberal elites support policies that give them the warm, fuzzy feeling of virtue, while imposing the costs on others. “Equity” programs are like this. Rich and upper middle class white kids always find a way to get taken care of, while middle and working class white and Asian kids (among others) find themselves shut out of jobs and educational positions, all so liberal elites can feel good about themselves. The whole time I was working in newspapers, I saw lots of liberal white upper management types swoon over “diversity” initiatives that sought to hire people on the basis of skin color, but I never once saw one of these do-gooder white liberals resign to offer their position to a person of color. This is the kind of thing that conservatives resent.

As I’ve said in this space before, when I lived in Dallas, the city, like the whole state, was receiving a tidal wave of illegal migrants. The cost on the public schools and public health system was massive. Liberal do-gooders who welcomed all the migrants saw them as opportunities for conspicuous compassion, as well as a source of cheap labor. These liberals didn’t see all the poor and working class people — white, black, and Latino — in the region who had to pay the direct cost of a high influx of illegals, in having public schools swamped by children who spoke no English, and who therefore held up the education of native kids, and in having public hospitals overwhelmed by illegal migrants seeking health care.

And then there’s the crime, and the devaluing of property in neighborhoods where mass migrants settle. In 2003, not long after I arrived in Dallas, I went out to the inner-ring suburb of Irving to talk to some neighbors — including a man who immigrated legally from Mexico decades earlier — who were losing their quiet family neighborhood to houses filled with male laborers from Latin America, renting from absentee landlords. I went to the code inspector’s office at the City of Irving to find out why the city’s inspectors were allowing this to happen. They weren’t interested in doing any inspecting outside of office hours. If the illegal number of renters stayed away from the house during office hours, they were fine. This one local man I talked to said that when he came home from work and saw the SWAT team having blocked off the street to deal with a problem at that house, he decided that it was time to sell his place and get his family out of there. The local government, he correctly concluded, had no interest in solving this problem, and neither did the feds.

So to those who say that conservatives like DeSantis treat illegal migrants as political pawns, I say that so do liberal do-gooders, when they refuse to grapple with the very real costs of mass illegal migration. I am grateful that these red-state governors are giving the good people of Martha’s Vineyard a chance to show their compassion and increase the diversity of their enclave, because as we know, diversity is our strength. Why should Del Rio, Texas, have a monopoly on virtue?

UPDATE: Arizona native Meghan McCain:

The most elite and insulated areas of the country are now dealing with the issues that border state citizen and politician have faced on a daily basis for years.

It was too easy for the left to dismiss warnings from Americans on the border by decrying them as racists and bigots.

Lapdog mainstream media was all too happy to go along with that dangerous and disingenuous narrative.

Remember when Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a teary photo shoot outside a migrant detention center in Texas?

Where is she now?

The problem has only gotten worse.

Of course, this issue was never about racism or bigotry.

It is always about soft-hearted, utopian policies that cause more suffering.

It takes real courage to do what is right and that’s a secure border and controlled immigration.

Anyone who has ever lived in a border state, as I have, is acutely aware of how dangerous and inhumane our system is.

Pregnant women die in the desert trying to cross the border, immigrants drown trying to swim across the Rio Grande, entire busloads of immigrants bake to death in extreme heat as they’re smuggled in trailer trucks.

There is drug trafficking, human trafficking, sexual abuse and murder.

UPDATE.2: Agreed — if this really happened, it’s wrong, and shameful.

UPDATE.3: They’ve moved past the “kids in cages” thing, and are now saying that shipping illegal migrants to one of the fanciest towns in the USA is like the Holocaust: