Forced Relocation of Migrants
Cruelty with compound interest.
A collaborative NYT report, “Bus by Bus, Texas’ Governor Changed Migration Across the U.S.,” demonstrates a huge pitfall of the standard way in which news is reported.
The autumn of 2021 delivered a shock to the state of Texas. More than 9,000 migrants crossed the border on a September day into the town of Del Rio and huddled in a tent camp under a bridge. Thousands more came later that week from countries all over the world, challenging the town’s ability to handle them.
The following spring, Texas opened a new frontier of its own. On April 13, a bus pulled into Union Station in Washington, D.C., carrying 24 migrants who had been offered a free ride from Del Rio, chartered by the state’s Division of Emergency Management. More buses arrived in the capital over the next several days.
Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, suggested that many of the migrants had been “tricked” into riding the buses by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott. The White House called it a “political stunt.”
We had the same assessment here at OTB, devoting several posts to the “border stunt,” going so far as to label the tactic a “reverse freedom ride.” Once the tactic became routine, however, the press lost interest in it and it disappeared from my radar screen. We haven’t posted about it in almost two years before this morning.
In the two years since Mr. Abbott dispatched the first buses from Texas, the busing program has turned into a significant part of the country’s transportation infrastructure for migrants.
A New York Times analysis of state records, immigration data collected by Syracuse University and records from the destination cities, as well as interviews with dozens of migrants, city officials and immigration organization leaders, show that the Texas program is continuing to expand its reach — new target cities include Boston, Detroit and Albuquerque — and helping to reshape migration across the United States.
For every five migrants who had immigration court hearings scheduled in New York, Chicago or Denver over the last two years — a clue to where they planned to live — one migrant traveled to those cities on a state-funded bus from Texas.
While Mr. Abbott did not create the migrant crisis that reached a peak at the end of last year, the analysis showed, he amplified and concentrated it. He took what otherwise might have been the slow diffusion of migrants from the border to cities and towns across the United States, and directed it at just a few places.
“I took the border to them,” Mr. Abbott told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention, where drastically curbing migration, a centerpiece of former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign, has been a frequent theme. “Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.”
In doing so, he appears to have succeeded in his stated aim: to shift the conversation around immigration in the United States, forcing Democrats to demand better border security and President Biden to reverse many of his pledges for a more welcoming immigration policy.
“If one of his goals was drawing attention to what happens at the border in a way that many interior cities don’t feel on a regular basis, then yes, that was successful,” said Camille Joseph Varlack, the chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams of New York.
If not for the sheer inhumanity of it, I could admire the ingenuity here. Border state governors have, quite rightly, complained for years that the federal government’s failure to control the borders has put substantial burdens that should be Washington’s onto their shoulders. And that liberal mayors of cities that don’t have this burden have criticized them for complaining about it. Abbott (and to a much lesser extent, his counterparts in Arizona and Florida) has certainly gotten their attention.
Alas, there is indeed the inhumanity of kidnapping tens of thousands of desperate people who don’t even speak the language and simply dumping them in the streets of cities with no infrastructure in place to handle them.
When we were last blogging about this, it did indeed seem like a mere stunt, however cruel. But its sustainment has been massive:
New York has spent $4.3 billion so far to handle the recent surge of arriving migrants — not all of whom arrived on Texas buses, of course — and the number was expected to rise to $10 billion by June 2025.
By comparison, the program has cost Texas more than $230 million. Overall, through the middle of June, the state has transported nearly 120,000 migrants on more than 2,600 buses to six cities, state records show. On at least nine occasions, the state also sent migrants by plane.
Most were from a single country: Venezuela. Absent the free transportation, many Venezuelans might have been expected to join large existing communities of their compatriots in places such as Florida and Texas.
The busing numbers in New York are striking. From the start of the Texas program through March, about 26,000 Venezuelan migrants had their initial immigration court hearings scheduled in the New York City area. During that same period, nearly 24,000 Venezuelans traveled to New York on a Texas bus.
“Two years ago, the top destination was Houston and Dallas,” said Valeria Wheeler, the executive director of a respite center in the Texas border city of Eagle Pass, describing how travel plans for newly arrived asylum seekers have changed.
But the picture is even more complicated than it seems: Secondary migration patterns have developed as cities with large numbers of arriving migrants became overwhelmed. Some of the migrants bused from Texas to those cities subsequently moved somewhere else.
New York has paid more than 35,000 migrants to leave, with Illinois, Florida and, yes, Texas among the top destinations. Denver has bought tickets for 22,000 migrants to go on to places like California, Utah and Florida. About 1,400 of them also went back to Texas. The state of Illinois helped fund more than 7,000 trips out of Chicago.
The rapid arrival of so many migrants, particularly asylum seekers who cannot get work permits for six months, proved too much for any one city to handle alone.
“We’re willing to provide that support,” Mayor Mike Johnston of Denver said. “We can’t provide it to everyone.”
The silver lining, I suppose, is that the liberal mayors have actually tried to live up to their stated ideals, attempting to deal with this crisis humanely. But the fact that they’re paying people to leave—in the tens of thousands— demonstrates their inability to do so. Which, again, demonstrates that, however cruelly he’s making it, Abbott has a point.
The whole thing is just a nightmare for the cities and the migrants alike. And one that has to be solved by the federal government, whose responsibility is to secure the border, rather than governors and mayors.
The federal government has to solve this problem. Yes, “securing” the border is part of the issue, but a much bigger part of the issue – one that is basically ignored in the media and online forums – is cutting off the thing that draws southern-border immigrants here in large numbers – work.
When I am elected president, we are going to pass legislation designed to arrest and imprison business owners and business managers who knowingly employ illegal/undocumented immigrants in their factories and farms. Further, we are going to shut down their businesses until new managers can be hired and go through training on legally hiring and managing workers.
I will be a one-term president because food costs are going to go up a ton in order to reflect what it costs to produce food under humane working conditions.
What if, instead of spending billions to incarcerate the immigrants and adjudicate their cases and sometimes deport them, what if we simply allowed them to stay and gave them citizenship?
Whenever I ask this question, horrified people exclaim that we can’t possibly handle the flood of people.
Except…we obviously ARE handling the “flood” of people since no seems to have noticed.
Like, 266,000 people have been added to New York. Has anyone noticed?
If tomorrow we were to wake up and discover that they had all been given citizenship, how would anyone’s life be different?
Still stuck in the past, I remind folks that one single location, Ellis Island, was able to process 5,000 to 10,000 immigrants per day for 10 years. A great many of these immigrants had less than 25 dollars. IIRC, the state of New York did not pay to transport immigrants to other cities.
The country needed workers (as it does today).
The apparent difference is that today’s immigrant is typically brown.
Texas spent $230 million to transport 120,000 migrants out of state? At $1,900 each, them’s some expensive tickets. I’d like to see a breakdown of the costs. Who got what?
Look, the refugee-migrant issue is a real conundrum for political parties of any stripe. Republicans appear to be incisive in their policy merely because they ignore moral guardrails and longterm realities, which serves their political expediency. But, this issue will not go away. It will get worse. Border barriers will temporarily slow down the movement until desperation drives alternate routes and methods. A rapidly changing climate will drive more desperation. Republican narrow minded climate policy, energy policy, foreign policy are all accelerants to migrant crisis. But of course, if accumulative Republican incompetence causes our economy to implode, migrants may no longer seek refuge here. So there’s that.
Send them to Mar-a-Lago. There is a lot of room there.
Convicted felon, private citizen Donald Trump has a lot of money.
Trump says: I’m a very proud Christian.
Let him prove it!
Blessed are the merciful; they shall obtain mercy.
It’s odd to call something “the underground economy,” given how much above-ground sectors of the economy (agriculture, meat packing, hospitality, restaurants, you name it) depend on it.
@Tony W: Not to mention the myriad of other important labor contributions these migrants make to our country — construction, infrastructure, semi-skilled tradework no longer performed by young Americans, elder care etc. Gov. Abbott from Texas, a border state long dependent on migrant labor should know this well. But these days, hyperbolic bluster and posturing, passes for public policy, real consequences be damned.
Not not to excuse the callousness or the real problems here, but I wonder if in 20 years we will look back at Abbott’s policy and say that it was the major factor in integrating this wave of migrants into America? How many new American stories will start with “then your abuelo got a bus ticket to Denver…”?
@Tim D.:
No doubt that the forced migration will redistribute the eventual settling place for these undocumented.
I remind me of the forceable relocation of native Americans from their traditional home lands to Oklahoma, another proud moment in American history.
@Bobert: Like I said, I’m not excusing the callousness, but the unintended consequence might be to protect folks from the literal fash GOP plans for mass deportation. Assuming the sanctuary cities stay true to their values and are able to fight back.
@Mister Bluster: Or even more to the point,
Or for the goalpost movers among us,
But Trump knows he’s not a “Christian” in any meaningful sense of the term. Or as some rando “evangelical” expressed it to am member of the press a while back [not an exact quote, sorry]
(For clarification purposes, I don’t believe that America is “a Christian nation.” And neither do they. It’s a campaign slogan. God must be soooo proud. 🙁 )
@Kingdaddy: Food and hospitality industries have depended on black marketeering for as long as there have been markets. Black market commerce in human lives simply became an emerging trend in this submarket with the onset of the Dust Bowl migration.
@Bobert:
I know skin color is part of the issue. But it’s best not to gloss over that immigrants weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms then either.
Yes, they were processed at Ellis Island, but some had their names forcibly changed. And once they got to where they were going, they faced plenty of discrimination and violence.
Well, we are about to get some answers to the questions we have discussed over the last couple weeks.
Immediate thoughts (subject to change):
-Biden should have a quiet deal with Harris to resign at some point soon–secrecy is necessary, because someone on the Biden team will leak it. Based on some things I have read, some of his staffers seem as petty as Trump’s staff. Check that, I’m convinced this is just how many people are.
When Bernius and I discussed this possibility before, it was a little like the campaign funds uncertainty–we had to make assumptions to discuss it.
We discussed a transitionary period allowing Harris can get her campaign off the ground while gradually taking over Presidential duties.
Honestly, I don’t think that works. If his endorsement is genuine, he should resign before the DNC. If she takes over the Presidency, I think it would be much more difficult for the anti-Harris crowd to push her out.
Also,
-Get ready for a bunch of “analysis” that says that Biden omitting the endorsement in his speech, and confining it to social media as tepid and bad for Harris.
-There is a decent possibility we get a flurry of competing leaks about undermining and backstabbing. Probably on both sides of the pro- and anti- Harris camps.
Jill Biden apparently did not get over her sense of betrayal for the bussing comment in 2020. Harris was close with Beau Biden and she saw it as a close family friend knifing her husband in the back. She was against picking Harris as VP. If true, I wonder if she has put that in the past or not.
Gotta go.
@Kurtz:
Yes, there was plenty of resentment and discrimination, but it was largely religiously based, Catholic vermin (largely Irish, Italian, Eastern Orthodox). That was the excuse for our “christian nation” to reject/discriminate White Europeans, they weren’t the “right” christians.
The notion that many had their names “forcibly” changed in Ellis Island is a myth. They were admitted with the names that were on the passenger manifests that were prepared PRIOR to arrival at Ellis Island.
@Chip Daniels: Employers would have to pay Social Security taxes and the like for their new citizen employees.