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'They enriched us.' Migrants' 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha's Vineyard
I encourage people to read the article before reading my impressions.
Incidentally, this article made me really wish for the Bare Links Repository back.
There is so much about this article that is just amazing to me. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe "witlessly mask off"?
First, I want to note the tic where every time the author notes an age, he specifies that the migrant in question looks younger. It's just so artlessly manipulative.
Second, the people patting themselves on the back for the casual, mild, one-off generosity. Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids, which is extra Wholesome 100 because he lives in his car because the rent is too damn high. It's like Ray Sanchez crammed an entire scathing allegory about life and housing in the blue zones into a sentence and didn't even notice.
Third, I'd really like to see the argument for how offering people a plane ride to a rich resort town is a human rights violation.
But the thing that really gets me is the detailed, yet uselessly vague, descriptions of the incredible dangers the migrants had to overcome to get to the US. Murderous mud and murderous cartels, and floods and cliffs. Coming from Venezuela, it's 2,684 miles by plane. Map software can't even calculate a route by land, I'm guessing it's something more like 4,000 miles, going through at least seven other countries. The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers. No one seems to notice that these people trekked, apparently on foot, halfway across the hemisphere, losing something like 2/3rds of their number to the assorted lethal dangers for exactly the storied rewards they want these people to get, quoting the article, "access to services including legal, health care, food, hygiene kits, and crisis counseling" along with housing.
The MV people celebrating themselves in this article seem to bear a large portion of moral blame for creating the exact incentive for people to take these risks and find themselves in these situations. Imagine if some billionaire was offering people a large sum of money to take their children and hike across a deadly desert. I think there would be mass outcry at how incredibly fucked up that was. And the few people who reached the other end are instead greeted with a king size Snickers bar and a crisp Benjamin to fuck off. Do you want people dying to get to you or not?! How many dead kids is worth a few hours of cultural enrichment?
I'm at a loss for how to categorize this, but it all just strikes me as appalling. This is the most cruelly champagne socialist shit I've ever read, and it's being presenting as flattery by CNN!
In fairness, when it comes to people from Venezuela, they are arguably both, and I can't exactly begrudge them for braving the absurd risks to come to America.
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They enriched us, and then we packed them off to keep them from cluttering up the place. They're someone else's problem to get them accommodation, money, jobs, etc.
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Your hatred is clouding your thinking. What, exactly, would you have considered the appropriate response?
Engage in charity individually
Coordinate aid to minimize the chaos
Lock the doors and hope they go away
Call their lawyers/politicians and make them go away
Hunt the most dangerous game from their thoroughbred horses
Choose according to your personal valuation of community vs. charity. All but the last would have been valid--if this weren't an active political maneuver. By framing the whole program as owning the libs, DeSantis added a giant publicity cost to anything which could be reported as pearl-clutching. It's only natural to choose the options least likely to give him the headlines he craves. If that's cringeworthy or tone-deaf, so be it.
Oh, but you've got to have something to froth about, so it's time to pick apart the execution of that option.
So "Republican governors" can organize a plan to ship them cross-country. And red states can pay tax dollars for the travel. And DeSantis can bluster and make political hay and otherwise ensure that it gets massive news coverage...and you're blaming the residents?
Say your roommate brings in a homeless guy from the street and tells you he needs to sleep on the couch you just bought. Maybe you put your foot down; maybe you decide to be a good Christian. If you're feeling really charitable you might even try to offer aid of your own.
The calculus changes if your roommate calls your friends, coworkers, and pastor and hints that you're going to lose your shit. Might you feel a little...constrained? A little incentivized to prove him wrong in front of your social circles?
Either way, it's not ambiguous who's to blame.
If people are putting up posters all over, posters that they saw elsewhere and copied so they could virtue signal, about how they welcome migrants -
and then when real migrants turn up, they send them off to be Somebody Else's Problem -
yeah, this was a stunt by DeSantis, but it's 'put your money where your mouth is time' and the Martha's Vineyard 'this is my second or even third home' owners (not the native locals, who earn their living by being, let's be blunt, service workers for the rich holidaymakers) are very, very lacking.
It would be very easy for me to put up a nice poster in my window claiming I welcomed all Zarazelans, when there isn't a Zarazelan within three hundred miles of me. When real Zarazelans turn up, then I have to put up or shut up.
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Keep them, or
Admit "we want them to go away"
"You are racists if you don't keep them, but we don't need to keep them" doesn't count.
I’m fine with either of those. “Put up or shut up.”
What sticks in my craw is the insistence that the residents are morally blameworthy for “creating the incentive”!
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Pool some of the massive amount of wealth available. Put them up in hotels for a week. Give them (and the MA authorities) an actual chance to figure out a real plan for them moving forward.
Honestly, I can even imagine a version of that article that didn't offend me so much. But the actual article reeked of poverty/suffering porn and self-satisfied fart-huffing over what is objectively extremely minor amounts of aid.
I'm obviously talking about the incredibly dangerous hike of 4000 perilous miles, not the last thousand traversed in a commercial, first world airplane. I am positing that people who support lax (or non-existent) border security bear some moral responsibility for the suffering endured, and the 2/3s who died along the way. Every "In this house" sign is a marginal incentive for people to risk their lives.
I would probably let him stay for more than 44 hours, in that case. And the calculus changes yet again if I've been openly championing "Unhoused Persons Rights", and supporting my city accepting homeless people from other areas. If the best I could do to "prove him wrong" was a single night before I had the homeless guy escorted out by the police, while I wailed for the reporters about how deeply I was moved by the experience, I would fully expect to be slammed for being a huge hypocrite.
Yes, the article was cringeworthy and the overall aid was mediocre. Slam them for being champagne socialists; I can argue degree but not direction.
I don’t see how that cashes out into moral blame for incentivizing migration. Those migrants made their 4K mile trek on the promise of steady work in Texas or California, not a full-size snickers. There was no expectation or plan to come park on an island and eat $26 hamburgers until certain politicians got involved. DeSantis wants to
stuntmake his opponents pay their “fair share,” fine. Assigning that blame to the residents for being too nice (while also complaining that they ought to have done more?) is ridiculous.Right, and who is making that promise? If people were met at the border with a wall, and told to go back home, very quickly no one would be risking a 4000 mile death trek. If you are encouraging people to make the trek, you deserve some blame for people making the trek. If you didn't know the trek was dangerous, you deserve scorn for being ignorant about your own policies.
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Empathy for the states that deal with this everyday.
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You realise this could apply to either side?
Yes.
Not really arguing with the general practice of bussing migrants to blue cities. At the very least there’s work and maybe infrastructure in place. Migrants (legal or otherwise) clearly choose that on their own sometimes.
My problem is with the OP trying to assign moral blame, in this case specifically, to the residents. If he finds it ridiculous for Dems to impose such costs on red states, maybe he shouldn’t try and claim they did it to themselves when the tables are turned.
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Let me help tie your analogy to the view of the right. Every night for the last 40 years, you've been inviting homeless people to stay in your roommate's room. Whenever he objects, you loudly and publicly denounce him as a bigot who hates the less fortunate, and correspondingly congratulate yourself on your depth of character. Sure he's been stabbed a few times, his belongings have been stolen, and his room is used as a stash house for a drug trafficking ring, but, as you are constantly reminding him, that's a small price to pay to make the world a better place.
On the night in question, you greet the homeless person graciously, tell them how much you appreciate them being there and the struggle they are going through, offer them a few jelly beans and then, as soon as the pastor leaves, you have the police escort them from the premises. You then post to facebook that your roommate is history's greatest monster for using a human being as a prop in your little domestic spat.
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Coordinate amongst themselves to find a place for migrants to live in, in the town. Instead they, successfully, demanded deportations and declared an emergency.
Being as generous as one demands others are, is the least one can do.
Reasonable. Or--more reasonable than the OP, I guess. I do note that deportation is not the same as "willingly" transferring them out, though the difference may only be superficial.
Aside from the irony of Republican lawmakers demanding token gestures of equal outcomes, and/or deciding that this is the proper implementation of a social safety net, there are a couple interesting arguments to be had.
First: are these folks the ones demanding others be generous? Trivially, yes, in the sense that they more likely Democrats, subscribe to (or own) left-wing media, and thus might have some culpability. Perhaps not in specifics, since having enough money to live on a luxury island is a great way to become grillpilled and studiously avoid the issue. One wonders how many MV residents have made a public statement on the matter, rather than nodding along at family dinners...It's certainly much easier to them to be sanguine about lax immigration knowing that the main costs will be paid by someone else.
Which brings us to the second point: why do so few illegal migrants end up in the Martha's Vineyards of the country? There are about 330 million legal Americans and almost 12 million illegal immigrants. Your link claims a population of 20k. If those 12M migrants ended up equitably distributed among the legal population, we'd expect at least 727 illegal immigrants living in the area. The lack of such a population is due to the isolation, yes, but also to an irregular job market and ridiculous competition for housing. It appears that migrants don't generally find it worthwhile.
This makes for an asymmetry. If illegal immigrants can't afford the $26 hamburgers, but can get by in San Antonio or even mainland Massachusetts, how did the MV residents become responsible for paying the difference? It's one thing to argue that by voting Democrat they have "demanded" others, in the general sense, make room. I am not so convinced that affirmative migrant action is commensurate.
For the same reason that the ones who got sent there got kicked out.
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Literally the only thing I want to hear from the MV residents who were so 'enriched' after this experience is whether they want to accept more migrants or not.
If so, Texas can start sending them trainfuls. Should turn out great. Win-Win-Win for all.
If not, then at least stop playing at being a 'sanctuary' city if you are unable or unwilling to provide sanctuary.
I don't think ANYONE actually believes they support these people in anything more than the abstract sense if they only take action when migrants are brought directly to their doorstep. It's just standard NIMBY behavior.
The reality behind "santurary cities" I think is bringing more heat than light. The policy is surprisingly reasonable in the actual specifics. The policy is point is to et local prolice actually be able to interact with illegal immigrants to solve and prevent crime. If they have to work with ice they will be avoided at all costs by the likes of victims and community members. If you don't want sychopath serial criminals hiding out with a population that cannot reasonable expel them then you need something like this. There are plenty of ways that the ability to prevent illegal immigration are hampered by the denizens of MV, but this is not the important one.
IMO those sorts of policies are defensible, but the broader "anti-immigration enforcement" sentiment (the bailey, as it were) includes state judges sneaking immigrants out literal back doors to avoid ICE custody and San Francisco trying to avoid the deportation of felons wanted on federal murder charges.
I'm not opposed to real immigration reform, but fighting over enforcement is, I think, a pretty bad look.
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The reality of Dallas becoming a sanctuary city because otherwise the large community of undocumented El Salvadorans will allow MS-13 to shelter among them for fear that the police call ICE is fairly reasonable. Same for LA, Phoenix, San Antonio, Houston, etc. That’s because otherwise law abiding illegals and their children make up a large percentage of those cities’ underclass and are willing to talk to the police if it isn’t a deportation risk.
Martha’s Vineyard becoming a sanctuary city when it already has functionally no illegal immigrants and no gang presence is pure political signaling, and the same thing can be said for other cities that lack the specific condition of ethnic gangs trying to hide among otherwise pro-law and order undocumented coethnics.
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Yes, but this still implies that the migrants are actually able to stay in the city itself.
The implication has always been that they want migrants near them.
But the people who are most in favor of allowing illegal immigrants to stay are, conspicuously, the ones who never have to live in and around said immigrants. There's consistently a lack of skin in the game with this particular policy prescription.
Do you really think if we polled people in major metro areas (the place where the vast majority of illegal immigrants actually live) on what they think, they'd be in favor of large scale deportation? They have skin in the game and also generally don't care. Conversely, why is it that some of the most intense xenophobia comes out of places in the interior of the country that attract next to no migrants?
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True, but for those of us who do live around them I prefer the police that be more effective.
Yup.
Although we could go off on the tangent about the people pushing 'defund the police' and most likely to believe that police officers are a danger to minorities turn out to usually be those who least depend on the police for protection.
It's just contradictions all the way down if you dig into it.
If Martha's Vineyard supports open borders or at least is okay with large amounts of migrants coming across, I'd love to hear their coherent reasons for explaining why those migrants can't stay in their town.
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Let's not forget one guys says a $26 hamburger is "much more" than he could earn in a month in Venezuela (if he could find work). Four months salary worth of candy, passed out by a guy who seems relatively poor. Yeah, I'd try too.
22 out of 60 survived traversing the Darien Gap. That's rough.
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What, in your opinion, would have been the appropriate journalistic tone for CNN to take with their coverage?
DeSantis sent a bunch of asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard, where they received befuddled but basically well -meaning help, and were essentially told "careful, it gets super cold up here and it's hard to find work."
CNN is trying to make human-interest lemonade.
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Was it legal what DeSantis did? As far as PR stunts go, it was a huge success and way boosts his odds for 2024, assuming he isn't criminally charged for this stunt.
If he’s charged then we live in a banana republic. You can’t use courts to arrest political rivals.
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If he were criminally charged, I think it'd become an even more successful PR stunt.
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What exactly would the crime be? And why wouldn't it apply to every NGO, congressional staffer and lawyer doing similar things to get people to and over the border in the first place?
It is almost certainly illegal in some capacity to fly illegal immigrants further into the country. I’m almost certain the federal aviation code, at least, has something against flying around people who have no legal right to be in the country. There’s probably also a law against inducing people to travel under false pretenses and you can no doubt get some of the migrants to testify that they did not know they were going to Martha’s Vineyard.
Now getting charges to stick is probably another matter but I would be very surprised if the DOJ can’t find something, assuming it wants to.
The Biden administration has been doing exactly this for years.
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It is not. Obama started a program to relocate illegal immigrants deeper into the country back in 2014: https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/judicial/289742-just-before-election-obama-doubles-down-on-illegal-immigrant-fly/
Biden restarted and expanded the program.
His administration went farther, now illegal aliens can use their arrest warrants as ID for TSA purposes.
From https://www.theepochtimes.com/tsa-backtracks-on-allowing-illegal-immigrants-to-use-arrest-warrants-as-id-to-fly_4229583.html
Just yesterday I met a Turkish man who came to my church asking for a place to stay for two days. After I downloaded Google Translate, he said he’d come up through Mexico and has been in a camp just outside of town for a month, and on Monday, he has a flight to New Jersey. He’s using his ICE paperwork as his ID.
After he and I were both unable to find local church resources, I started looking up hostels, and he interrupted, asking if we’d just drive him to the airport instead. So we gave him a ride.
It was the oddest encounter I’ve had in years.
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But none of these people were illegal immigrants, were they? They have all requested asylum, if I am not mistaken, and hence they indeed have the right to be in the country pending adjudication of their asylum cases. See discussion here.
Nor, contrary to what some on the left have opined, is he guilty of human trafficking, which requires the purpose of using the victim for commercial sex, labor or services.
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it helps that those NGOs and staffers have the establishment on their side
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I know that politics isn't supposed to makes sense, but this news cycle has made extra no sense. Everybody seems to be at peak rhetorical incompetence, from the left with stuff like the above, and the right with "Democrats are once again the real racists!"
I don't know about incompetence. The way I understand it is that Southern states do not have legal ability to deport illegal migrants - that is federal government responsibility. There are sanctuary cities up north supposedly willing to help these immigrants. So sending them over there should be win/win situation. Southerners are racists and Sanctuary cities will take up on the burden.
This BTW reminds me of a reverse situation from EU migrant crisis. Except all immigrants wanted to go to Germany/Sweden which were the countries that were most vocal about helping them. Only for the situation to be turned around with all the negotiations about quotas for migrants for different countries and so forth.
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