Don’t give us your tired, your poor….
Also on immigration: New York sues bus companies; A one-man effort on ‘Ice-Air’
Immigration has almost always been a mess in the United States, almost right from the very beginning and politics has often been part of the problem.
Some historians like to pretend that we’re a melting pot where ideas and cultures have blended beautifully into one miraculous sauce, but the process has been much more like watching sausage being made. The blending tastes nice in the end but it has never been pretty, and I suspect no matter how much we pretend it never will be.
More truthful takes on history will report all sorts of discrimination and even violence against immigrants from other shores when they came here. The Irish, who had the same Anglo-Saxon heritage as most early Americans were given some of the roughest treatment, but other Europeans had it had it about as hard.
Those from the Slavic nations were considered mentally incapable when they arrived, though they were almost certainly as adept as anyone.
Other languages, other cultures, other colors have all been given short shrift here. Of course, we did not do right by the real first Americans — the natives — either.
Nothing much has changed. The answer to the question, “Are the Democrats or are the Republicans to blame for immigration problems is a simple, “Yes.”
No politician gets a pass. A better question might be, “Does anyone really want to solve the problem?
That’s not obvious. When Donald Trump was in office, Republicans, who had been railing for years that the Democrats were doing immigration all wrong, controlled both houses of Congress and could get nothing done.
Before that, George W. Bush couldn’t get his own Republican plan through Congress, which was again controlled by his own party.
Democrats have fared no better. You can forget the Trumpian folderal about “open borders,” that’s just political beans, but the Dems haven’t come up with any answers to have controlled immigration at our southern border.
No answer is going to be acceptable for a majority of Americans, though we had an open border with Canada for years and there was no great amount of complaining.
The southern border is different. The people entering the U.S. from there are brown and they speak a different language. In Texas, the language isn’t so different. You probably don’t even know the number of “Spanglish” words you use in the day.
A growing number of Americans, though, believe we don’t need one more Latinx immigrant in the United States. Others would like to control immigration but don’t care to put children into wire cages or treat human beings as if they were vermin. There are probably still others who don’t care at all.
Part of the Republicans’ fear of immigrants comes from the belief that they will all vote Democratic the first chance they get. Unlikely.
First, it will take years for them to gain the citizenship necessary to vote. Second, getting people to vote in Texas is next to impossible, even when they have a vested interest in going to the polls. Don’t by the idea that thousands of illegal immigrants are voting already. It just isn’t true.
Fear gains votes, though and fear will continue to play a big role in the Republican message against immigrants.
What few people talk about is how much this immigration helps the economy. The first impact of illegal immigration will be felt at the border and the border communities are absolutely booming. This is not an argument for uncontrolled immigration but only to show that the story is not one-sided or simple.
Now that we are officially in an election year, immigration at the southern border has become magnified as an issue. A “caravan” of 10,000 people is winding its way from Southern Mexico to the Texas border. The fear-mongers are having a day with that and predicting an “invasion.”
As an aside, did you ever wonder how such caravans get organized? Who pays for that? Do they simply gather together organically as they pass from town to town? Good questions all.
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Kindred developments include New York City suing the bus companies used by Texas to ship out legal immigrants from our border to the Big Apple.
So far, New York City has done a better job than Texas in taking care of these pitiful political pawns, but Mayor Eric Adams is getting a case of the fantods over the continued buses arriving from Texas.
This borders on — maybe well over the border — being inhumane treatment of people who have no control over where they can go. I don’t really expect Gov. Greg Abbott to care about that, but I would expect better from Adams. Seems as if that is asking too much.
Suing the bus companies is easier than suing Texas and could put some kinks into Abbott’s plans. Good.
A well-coordinated plan with other states, where officials knew when immigrants were expected to arrive and time to prepare is not an unreasonable solution to some of this. I understand a desire to share the load but coordinate, governor. Otherwise, it is just a dirty trick using people as bait.
Speaking of lawsuits, there are already four suits pending over a new Texas law — passed by the legislature at Abbott’s insistence — that makes illegal immigration a state offense for which people can be jailed.
Immigration is purely a federal function, though, and it will be interesting to see if Texas is allowed to do this. It will mean more stress on Texas county jails and more expense to taxpayers. It doesn’t seem as if it will really solve a single problem.
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Finally, on matters of immigration, you may not know about “ICE Air.”
That’s not a real name for an airline but the number of flights booked by Immigration Control and Enforcement would certainly match many a commercial carrier, though you may never have imagined that.
This is partly because ICE doesn’t announce any of the flights, which go all over the world, and it is only because one man — his name is Thomas H. Cartwright — does his best to track them all down.
Over the last four years, Cartwright (pictured in the photo above) has tracked more than 27,000 flights paid for by ICE, both to send immigrants back home or to shuttle them from place to place within the United States.
How much does all this cost? It turns out that ICE doesn’t advertise this fact, but it isn’t cheap, that’s for sure. One has to wonder if relocating the immigrants is worth the cost of doing so.
Cartwright is a retired executive vice president with JP Morgan, where he worked for 38 years. All his numbers are approximate because of the secrecy imposed by ICE but he goes through a painstaking process to verify ICE flights. He may have some misses one way or the other, but they are few.
There are roughly half-a-dozen private carriers who do the flying.
In just the last year, there have been more than 8,000 flights. Cartwright estimates there are six or seven ICE flights per day.
Cartwright runs his own website www.witnessattheborder.org where you can see what he has learned. No matter how you feel about the immigration issue his attention to this brings us information we need and would get no other way.