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.
