“Let me say loud and clear to Greg Abbott and his enablers in Texas with these continued political stunts,” Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot told a September 1 news conference, “Gov. Abbott has confirmed . . . he is a man without any morals, humanity or shame.”
Abbott’s alleged shame is busing a small percentage of the migrants streaming into Texas on to Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The bussed are volunteers: the migrants can choose to go or not.
Not too shockingly, however, the mayors in all three cities are crying foul quite “loud and clear.” Which only makes the Texas governor’s point. Abbott wants to dramatize the cost, seeking federal help so Texas doesn’t bear the brunt of the massive influx of folks illegally crossing the border — a record 1.7 million last year, estimated to hit 2.1 million more this year.
What particularly peeved Mayor Lightfoot was the lack of any “level of coordination and cooperation” from Texas authorities. At issue? “Those huddled masses yearning to breathe free in the United States,” Washington Post columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr. explains, “usually arrive with empty pockets.” They have needs.
Last Wednesday, 147 more migrants arrived in Chicago, where Lightfoot has declared they will be welcomed. But . . . well . . . within hours she sent 64 of those individuals to a hotel in (Republican-voting) Burr Ridge, some 20 miles from downtown Chicago.
Bussed, no less.
Burr Ridge Mayor Gary Grasso blasted the fact “that nobody from the city, from the state called and told me.”
“This isn’t about them, the migrants are fine,” he insisted, but went on to complain that “they’re being used as political pawns by the governor and mayor.”
Add U.S. congressmen and especially the president to that list of shameful bussers, for Abbott’s tactic mimics the federal government’s transporting of migrants from border areas to other parts of the country.
Sure migrants are pawns in their game. We citizens should sympathize, for we are pawns in their shame.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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3 replies on “Pawns in Their Shame”
Bussing is only bad when Repubs do it.
Because we have good intentions.
These migrants are not pawns. They are illegal aliens taking advantage of Americans’ good will. They are invaders and don’t have any status as pawns.
Of course immigrants should not be given state subsidies; but, ultimately, those with whom each of us or our associations trade or those to whom we give charity should be ours to determine. If an America employer, landlord, or grocer wants to do business with a Guatemalan, the rest of us should acquiesce if not indeed cheer.
Rather than focus on the downstream problem of people coming to engage in paracitism because the state as enticed them to do so; we should focus on the enticements themselves, and refuse to allow sneering and incoherent moralizing in defense of those enticements to go unchallenged.