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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 is 100% playing politics with the border. Well, maybe 90%; we've got to leave some room for Florida, which is apparently so overwhelmed that they have to use Texan migrants for their publicity stunts.
First, what's the cost of living in rural Texas or California? How about NYC? We already have a method for evaluating how much someone is willing to live in a particular location. It's curious that Republican lawmakers have chosen this particular cause to intervene in the market. There is a symmetrical argument for job markets; the demand for cheap agricultural labor in NYC does not compare to that in a commensurate area of west Texas or SoCal. Martha's Vineyard was a particularly extreme case--dumping migrants somewhere with no jobs and a high opportunity cost suggests that efficiency is a low priority indeed.
Second,
How many illegal migrants do you think we get in a year? Because that rate suggests 75K * 35 = 2.6M/yr. Actually, I'm seeing a NYC population more like 1/39th of the US, which would suggest a total intake of 2.9M/yr. Given that the total illegal population has been stable or declining since 2007, at something like 10-12M, I find this rather unlikely. Source 1, source 2.
I don't have estimates for how many illegal immigrants are already in NYC, but Table 3 from source 2 estimates 520-630K in New York state. the city has 8.38M of the state's 19.5M people. Using the low end, since cost of living and agricultural labor likely pull migrants away from NYC, a rough estimate suggests 220K illegal immigrants already in NYC. That's somewhere between 1/44 and 1/36 of the total illegal population.
If the total illegal population is mostly stable, and NYC already has, to a first approximation, its "fair share" of that population...what's the justification for shipping them more migrants?
Most illegal immigrants already live in a couple of metro areas, generally in blue states or blue cities in red states. The issue is not really about the distribution of the notional burden of illegal immigration; it is a fundamental dispute whether or not illegal immigration/asylum seeking is even a big deal.
Then perhaps proponents should be honest about it rather than using a pretense of correcting unfairness.
It's okay for Republicans to say "we don't want these immigrants, so we are making them your problem." Democrats are entitled to object to this (manufactured) burden. If that's the case, Republicans shouldn't get to act as if their maneuver highlights hypocrisy.
Manufactured by?
Why not?
I think I made it pretty clear, above, that New York isn't obviously shirking. If they're already supporting their "fair share," then objecting to additional busses is not hypocritical.
You're welcome to disagree. Please try to make an actual argument instead, though.
If I have a roommate and I bring a new dog in despite my dog-hater roommate’s protests, then complain about how my roommate has been starting to shaft dog food costs on me, is that hypocrisy or not? Would my roommate getting me to walk the dog more than 50% of the time be a manufactured burden?
What exactly is a fair share of responsibility on something between two parties when one party clearly didn’t want that something and had that something imposed on them?
I don’t even have a dog (ha ha) in this fight, I live in another country and don’t really have strong opinions on immigration one way or the other, and immigration where I live generally seems to be positive.
But it doesn’t seem like the problem is either manufactured, or that it doesn’t highlight some sort of hypocrisy.Let me rephrase: It doesn't seem like the problem is entirely artificial and Republicans just decided to fuck with New York just to dunk on them, and it isn’t obvious that there isn’t some sort of hypocrisy in asking for other states to process massive amounts of prospective immigrants on short notice (as “illegals” and asylum seekers do) while when the same thing happens in their own borders they shit themselves, irrespective of whether they are taking in a “fair share” of immigrants.More options
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