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Backlash to the border bussing policies: To the surprise of no one, sanctuary cities don't actually want hundreds of thousands of poor foreigners wandering about in their backyards. New York City- which has received the largest number of migrants shipped from the southern border by Greg Abbott- is the site of protests https://nypost.com/2023/09/05/another-massive-rally-expected-outside-staten-island-school-turned-migrant-shelter/ Obviously not all of these people are democrats, but some of them seem to be. But the real story is down below, in LA.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/la-city-council-texas-governor-migrant-busing/story?id=102840424
Obviously, some of this is just hypocrisy and looking out for number one- it's fine for you to have hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers camped under highway overpasses with no say in the matter, but don't you dare dump any on me- but I'm struck by 1), the fact that the LA city council thinks injunctions and lawsuits will work
When in reality Abbott has no incentive to stop when a federal judge tells him to, he has every incentive to appeal to the supreme court and ignore the federal judge- he does after all want to win his 2026 primary- and realistically unless the federal government decides to take over the border itself, or meet his demands, they can't make him stop. Both practically- he wants these people to be someone else's problem- and politically- this makes him look tough to a base that doesn't already think of him that way- there's every reason for Greg Abbott to just keep doing this until he's lost much, much bigger than anybody seems to be talking about, or his demands are met.
And of course, 2), the decision to cast this as human trafficking
When, likewise in reality, "free bus tickets to New York/LA/DC" is quite an appealing pitch to migrants living under a bridge in McAllen and Eagle Pass Texas. After all, most of them didn't walk from Venezuela with the intent of settling in McAllen, they wanted to go further into the US. And obviously Abbott's real incentive is to get them out of his jurisdiction as fast as possible, which means offering free bus tickets to the places they actually wanted to go to in the first place. There just isn't a scenario where the migrants stayed in Eagle Pass long term; they could be deported to Honduras or wherever they came from, or they could go somewhere else in the country.
Schadenfreude all the way on this one. If you're going to call yourself a sanctuary city, then live up to it. Otherwise, "we're a sanctuary city so long as none of the alleged refugees turn up on our doorstep" is just virtue signalling. Funny how all those thousands of future productive citizens who will stimulate the economy by the advantages of immigration turn into resource sinks when they do show up in the big city that is built by immigrants and has plenty of jobs, instead of border towns and the south and western states, isn't it?
Particularly when you have people leaving food and water dumps in the deserts for the illegal immigrants because "no human is illegal!" and breaking laws. If it's fine to break laws to support immigrants, why expect Abbott to abide by legal decisions?
So why is LA putting obstacles in their way? Why doesn't it want to help people who have fled injustice and are in fear for their lives?
Yes, it's a stunt, but by God it's great to see the hypocrisy of the liberals exposed like this.
What share of illegal immigrant/asylum seekers/etc... do you think wind up in California? (Spoilers: it's a lot, considerably more than Texas)
LA and the state of CA have perfectly adequate reasons to oppose migrant busing without exposing themselves as secretly anti-immigrant hypocrites:
The preponderance of evidence suggests this is an exercise in lib-owning, so it really shouldn't be surprising that liberal governing bodies are opposed to it.
So you think TX should be forced to host immigrants that it does not desire, whereas CA should not be forced to do the same even though it desires immigrants?
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This is all very very weak
This would be valid if the response was "Hey, it's great that you're sending us these people! Can we coordinate to handle this better?", and TX refused to send more people with coordination.
This requires admitting that immigrants are "undesirables" -- otherwise the precedent is that TX can ship people that CA wants to CA.
This doesn't appear to have enough reason behind it to even refute.
Of course it's an exercise in lib-owning. What do you think lib-owning is, if not exposing their hypocrisy and virtue signaling? Saying "You're getting a kick out of my floundering around in cognitive dissonance when you expose my hypocrisy!" is not a defense.
Who's surprised? The fact that liberal governing bodies are opposed to something their stated beliefs demand they support is exactly the point. That's why it's "owning the libs"
No, it requires admitting that TX regards them as such.
When large groups of people tell you they believe X for reason Y, you should generally believe them.
Or, to put it another way, if they have such a problem with migrants, why do they have no problem with the literal millions of them already there? What it is about a few additional busloads that makes it a bridge too far? Nativists prefer to believe that this exposes their opponents as hypocrites because it vindicates their own sentiments ("our enemies secretly agree with us"), but it doesn't square with reality.
Showing off to your supporters that you're tough and cruel to the people they hate.
Absolutely not.
If you inherit your fathers rifle and think it's "icky", then a gun collector would be happy to take it off your hands without worrying about "setting a precedent" that it's okay for anti gun people to gift guns to pro gun people.
Yeah, no. Not when it's politically convenient to have an excuse, and there's no substance behind it.
And the number of people does very little to make something more credible, since it's not like they're independent observations.
This does nothing to provide substance to the claim. There's still no proposed reason why "bussing migrants is bad", so nothing to even argue with.
Absolutely not.
The Wikipedia page is actually pretty decent on this one.
You may find it to be "cruel" to make fun of people for their exposed cognitive dissonance, but it is specifically getting a kick out of proving their perspectives to be reliant on mental contortions. Quoting Wikipedia here, "Online troll Jacob Wohl has stated that the goal in owning the libs is to evoke in people "the type of unhinged emotional response that you would expect out of somebody who is suffering a serious mental episode."". There are plenty of ways to be cruel to people you disagree with which you do not see falling under "own the libs" -- for example, "punch nazis!" is a thing, but "punch libs to own them!" is not, despite it being a great way to show how tough and cruel you are to the people they hate.
In contrast "owning the libs" works well even the "lib" in question is smiling and being a relatively good sport about it. Jordan Peterson vs Cathy Newmanis a good example. It is an asymmetric weapon in that it only works if you can successfully frame your opponent as having no rational response, and isn't even cruel to the extent that your outgroup can demonstrate humility, intellectual integrity, and a sense of humor when they can't respond with a rational thought. Those which can be humiliated with truth should be.
The whole point of "owning the libs" is definitely to own the libs. Yes, they get a kick out of doing it. Yes, there are social incentives to get "high fives" from the ingroup. Yes, people on the right sometimes like to pretend that their arguments are more solid than they actually are, and conveniently fail to notice valid rebuttals (shame on them). Yet the purpose of doing and rewarding this behavior is to actually show the libs to be fools, and to the extent that it is obvious that it is not doing this, the behavior isn't socially rewarded.
And as a result, the only valid response is... a valid object level response. Pointing out that they are high fiving each other and enjoying having made you look like a fool doesn't help your case, unless you first show that you aren't actually the fool you appear to them to be.
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The whole issue here seems to be that states other than TX, such as CA, finds it undesirable that TX give these people bus tickets that have places like CA as the destination. I'm not sure how it's possible to frame this in a way that doesn't fully admit that the decisionmakers in places like CA that are complaining or at least pushing back at this action by the decisionmakers by TX are seeing these immigrants as "undesirables."
"We don't want to establish a precedent that other states can just ship people they don't want here without our prior consent. If migrants want to come here on their own that's fine, but we don't want the TX government deciding next week that since we're not doing anything about immigrants they can save money on vagrancy or prison facilities as well."
Then why call yourself a sanctuary city?
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That precedent was established a long time ago when CA and TX (and other states involved) joined the United States with the expectation of free movement of people between the borders. If TX officials are handing out bus tickets to people, and those people are voluntarily choosing to use those bus tickets to transport themselves to other places within the United States as they have a right to do, then the Union is working as intended.
If TX officials are using coercion, manipulation, or even just the slightest bit of pressure to these migrants to "ship" them off to other states, that's certainly an issue, though it's one between the individual migrants who have been wronged and the government officials who have wronged them. From what I can tell, there's likely some evidence that something like this took place, and justice for these wronged migrants seems worth pursuing. But if the objection is to a different state handing out resources to its inhabitants which then free them up to voluntarily choose to move within the United States to one's own state of residence, then, again, I don't see how to interpret that objection as anything other than the declaration that those people are "undesirables" in some meaningful way.
What evidence? Assertions from people who don’t want to have to deal with them?
It doesn’t seem likely that significant numbers of migrants illegally hop the border to take up residence in places like Eagle Pass and McAllen, and the state governments shipping them off are able to produce signed consent forms on a regular basis.
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Sounds like they should petition the Federal Government to intervene in some way.
But it also sounds like if the migrants sign a simple form in their own language that says "I consent to being shipped to California" that this concern goes away.
And absolutely none of this avoids the fact that the source of the problem is unfettered migration across the Southern Border, which could be fixed if there were action taken at the Federal Level, but that the Democratic Party has decided is not worth addressing. Indeed, they will take photo-ops next to the 'cages' where they keep the kids at the border to make you feel bad about current immigration restrictions.
So in essence, if your policies are creating a problem for another state, why do you get to complain when they make it your problem as well? Especially if you have been previously denying up and down that it was actually a 'problem' and saying it was, in fact, desirable.
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The position of the left-wingers is that countries have no moral right to exclude any immigrant that isn't literally part of the Taliban or ISIL, and that all complaints about practical matters such as housing are actually just a cover for ethnic hatred, and that no measure for immigration enforcement is acceptable.
In what way is it unacceptable to make them bear the full burden of their position that housing and other resources are free and materialize the instant an immigrant shows up?
Why should they not be made to take all unauthorised migrants in the entire country? They volunteered.
Sanctuary cities are free riding, and to correct the incentives this should be fixed.
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"Immigrant" isn't a fungible good. There is lots of different immigrants, and they have a very blatantly different levels of desirability, but the upper middle class likes to pretend this is not the case for structural reasons. I'm not from the US, but the situation here in germany is this:
Highly educated, high functioning upper (middle) class natives (let's just simplify this to PMC, even if it's not quite the same) have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class people. Even supermarkets and similar establishments are de-facto quite segregated by class, and even the staff there will usually be at worst high-functioning lower class or middle class. As a result, they have almost no contact with dysfunctional lower class immigrants either, and plenty of contact with high functioning immigrants. Their opinion reflects this: They're pro immigration, since it's trivial for them to ignore the bad cases it's basically 100% upside. They think that bad cases are a minority, and that anyway even those simply haven't been helped enough (because the only lower class immigrants they meet are those that made it in spite of difficulties this makes sense from their perspective).
Lower class natives, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. They can't afford to live in the same neighbourhoods as PMC natives nor do they have the same political clout, so every time there is a wave of immigration their neighbourhoods are the first stop (either the immigrants themselves find a place since it's cheap, or the political class actively puts them there). At first it's somewhat balanced, but quite quickly high-functioning immigrants leave, or technically live there but spend as little time as possible in the neighbourhood.
We actually had a somewhat similar case here lately; During the worst of the immigration wave in relation to the syrian war, we build short-term accommodation for the worst-off immigrants that couldn't find anything else. There were several planned positions, and one of them was in our university quarter (the majority weren't). Unsurprisingly (to me, at least) there was a decent amount of resistance. By your argument, there was no hypocrisy here; the university already has plenty of immigrants (at times, the majority of my colleagues were immigrants), so being against more of them is not hypocritical. By the picture on the ground, it was very blatantly hypocritical; Almost every single immigrant we have here is a PMC, usually even the child of a PMC couple. In public, university staff claimed that criminality in relation to MENA immigrants was either an outright fabrication or at most a great exaggeration, that dysfunctionality among them was likewise no problem and that in general the large boost right-wing parties got was pure bigotry & racism. But please don't put these high-functioning non-criminal diversity-enriching people in OUR neighbourhood!
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Is this a standard you apply across the board? You'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's opposed to mass immigration (esp. illegal immigration) who admits that their opposition is based on hatred of foreigners - they always claim they're opposed to mass immigration because of the negative socioeconomic impact of mass immigration on their community.
Good luck finding:
women'sbirthgivers' bodies - they will instead insist that they do care about unborn babies and think aborting them is morally equivalent to murder.I very much doubt you're applying your own stated standard across the board. You say we should "generally" believe people who say they believe X because of reason Y, which implies that there are exceptions, and I suspect that all of these exceptions are people with whom you disagree.
Yes. I might think they don't take their avowed belief seriously (but then, who does?), but if, e.g. there are tens of millions of people saying they think abortion is murder I can probably guess that they actually believe a rough approximation of that rather than somehow coordinating tens of millions of people to lie about their motives.
It might not be their only motive, since social desirability bias encourages people to put their most acceptable justification forward, but we can pretty safely say they're mostly sincere about it.
No, but it's quite easy to find people who will admit that they think immigrants (or particular groups of immigrants) are lazy, dirty, criminal, parasitic, etc... or that they don't consider their lives to have equal value. Holocaust deniers won't generally just say "I hate Jews" and most of them probably don't hold that belief in so many words, but they will then go on to make some very sketchy claims about the character of Jews. And I'll be honest, it's not that hard to find people who will say that they think homosexuality is evil.
Simply put, you don't need a signed statement from someone saying "I self-identify as a racist/homophobe" for that to be a reasonable judgment.
So why is my judgement (that many Democrats who claim to support mass immigration, open borders and sanctuary cities are insincere virtue-signallers who only support these policies when they don't affect them personally) unreasonable? Aren't their reactions to Abbott and DeSantis's bussing stunts entirely consistent with them being insincere virtue-signallers?
Because it doesn't comport with the basic facts. Nobody here seems to be able to answer the question of why, if the Democrats/Blue States are hypocrites who are only pro-immigration when it's somewhere else, they are fine with the literal millions immigrants that live in their states (significantly more, I will note, than in red states - California has ~25% of all illegal immigrants in the entire country, while blue states have twice the overall number). The story the nativists are trying to tell is just nonsensical.
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The Democratic Party believe in "race conscious" policy. By your thinking, they have already agreed that racism is good and an acceptable basis for government policy.
These policies were supported with low epistemic standards, and they want to make them race-based content mandatory, so they even agreed that low quality racism is good and acceptable for institutional policy.
In what way do they have any moral standing to complain?
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Giving people free bus tickets sure is cruel.
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I'm aware of that, but New York complaining now about immigrants turning up is just extra-creamy richness of hypocrisy. Are we back to the days of the Know-Nothing Party?
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