The professional left seems to be going all in on what bad Christians the southern governors are. A bad Christian in their view is someone who demands that the people who trumpet their desire to welcome migrants the loudest actually welcome some migrants.
And from that you can sort of intuit what their idea of a good Christian would look like. It’s someone who deals with the thousands of people showing up at the border every day in perpetuity and never troubles the East Coast liberals and progressive activists who insist the current system is working humanely and as intended. A good Christian keeps all of the chaos, misery and human need down there where it belongs at the border.
The result of this media dynamic is that the good people of Martha’s Vineyard are being praised to the rafters for the way they’ve dealt with 50 migrants for less than two days. Meanwhile, the tacky people down south who’ve been dealing with a much larger influx for the past two years are merely proof that “the cruelty is the point.” Never mind that Texas has fed and clothed 1,000 times as many people as Martha’s Vineyard or that it does so routinely. And never mind that the fine folks in the Vineyard have already announced that those 50 migrants will have to leave the island soon because there’s no room for them long term. An island that welcomes nearly 200,000 people every summer doesn’t “have housing for 50 more people” the woman who runs the local homeless shelter said yesterday.
I saw someone last night suggest on Twitter that an actual good Christian would have offered to take some of these migrants off the hands of the overwhelmed southern states rather than just sit back and watch the chaos from afar. But you can bet the theological analysis of this situation won’t run that deep in the media.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the situation at the border remains a historic crisis. As I pointed out yesterday, the Biden administration is quietly begging Mexico to allow the US to return more migrants under Title 42, the Trump-era COVID protocol that the Biden administration has publicly said it wants to end. Mexico is apparently resisting that but did agree to fly more of the migrants at its northern border down to its southern border. That’s intended to at least slow the pace of migrants somewhat and I’m willing to bet no one in the media will suggest the Biden administration are acting like bad Christians for pushing Mexico to do this.
NBC News reports today that the Department of Homeland Security has proposed some fresh new solutions to deal with the border crisis. One of the suggestions that has been put on the table is to start up what’s being called “interior processing.” What is that you ask? Well it’s putting migrants on buses and airplanes and shipping them to cities around the country.
Wait, isn’t that exactly what those bad border state governors are already doing? Yes, which is why the White House is apparently dragging its heels on this plan. Another proposal was to skip the US entirely and send the migrants straight to the Canadian border.
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The White House has recently hosted a series of high-level meetings on immigration, where DHS officials have presented options, including flying migrants to the country’s northern border with Canada to alleviate overcrowding on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.
Some DHS officials have openly expressed frustration at those meetings with the White House’s reluctance to take a page from the book of Republican governors and begin transporting migrants to cities within the U.S., according to internal communications obtained by NBC News.
Under a plan proposed by DHS, migrants would be sent to such cities as Los Angeles, where shelters would get an advance warning to have time to prepare for the influx. The plan is designed to be less chaotic than what is happening now in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago and Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. Officials in those places have been caught by surprise as Republican governors in Texas, Arizona and Florida have sent migrants north to make a political statement.
The discussions come as the number of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border is nearing 8,000 per day, according to data obtained by NBC News.
White House officials have previously set 9,000 per day as an internal trigger to begin what they refer to as “interior processing,” where migrants are flown or bused from the border to interior cities where shelters can take care of them as they await reunification with family members and eventually their dates in immigration court.
As David pointed out yesterday, El Paso is already so overwhelmed that it has released about 9,000 migrants and is chartering buses to take them elsewhere because local shelters are at capacity. But for reasons that I think are obvious, the White House wants to hold out a little longer, hoping the problem won’t force them to adopt a plan that is strikingly similar to what southern governors are already doing.
In short, the White House is playing politics. Right now the president and the media are in lock step, harping about what a bad guy Gov. Ron DeSantis is. They won’t be able to keep that up once the White House endorses essentially the same solution. All of the progressives worried about the cruelty of “flinging” migrants around the country will suddenly have to drop it when Biden’s DHS is the one doing the flinging, just as they’ll continue to stay silent about Mexico flying migrants from their northern border to their southern border to help Biden out. For a lot of these good Christians on the left, the politics is the point.
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