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Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses
NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.
Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.
Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.
He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.
Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.
I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.
Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).
If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’
Texas isn't just playing politics, and a lot of that politics is more complex than "look at what Joe did to the border".
The largest single busing program is run by the city of El Paso, itself a democrat stronghold(albeit not always particularly progressive) and generally aligned against Governor Abbott. That this fact is only brought up by republicans trying to defend their own busing program is probably more political a decision than having busing programs to begin with.
A lot of these migrants are sheltering in the Rio Grande valley, which is realigning from "blue enough that these rural counties can't fill a room with local republicans" to "red-ish". A lot of this realignment is more or less the same people, too- existing elected officials are choosing to switch party registration, and in local terms this is aligning strongly with Greg Abbott. Busing migrants to blue cities elsewhere in the country is a way to reward newfound friends and punish long-term enemies, given that masses of unemployed and ethnically distinct(the valley is majority Hispanic, but it's mostly a specific kind of Hispanic- the descendants of white Mexicans living in Texas before independence from Mexico or at least before annexation by the US. The migrants are usually mestizo or indio centracos or Venezuelans.) poor people are generally not something anyone wants in their backyards.
-200,000 people a month is legitimately a lot and is getting used as cover for cartels trying to smuggle in drugs and slaves. This latter aspect is in heavy use in pro-border security narratives. There's also a major humanitarian aspect of having hundreds of thousands of unemployed poor people sitting around in a rural semidesert, and this fact is in heavy use in pro-busing narratives.
-Finally, busing is popular in Texas, although not overwhelmingly so, and this is probably a factor in Abbott's decision to continue the program. Texas is red but not red enough that he can afford to take a series of unpopular decisions with no consequences and Abbott would rather make it up elsewhere than compromise on abortion.
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