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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4842 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 18, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I agree with the conservatives, but here are some attempts to steelman:

  1. Martha's Vineyard is obviously not equipped to handle any number of migrants. If Florida can't take them, they should have sent them to an urban center that could.

  2. Florida has a duty to handle it's own migrants, and Martha's Vineyard has a duty to handle it's own migrants, the cause of the disparity doesn't matter, and dumping your problems on other people is wrong.

  3. Migrants can be accepted anywhere, and shipping them around as a political stunt is dehumanizing.

Martha's Vineyard is obviously not equipped to handle any number of migrants. If Florida can't take them, they should have sent them to an urban center that could.

As far as I know DeSantis sent migrants only to so called sanctuary cities and Martha's Vineyard is apparently one of them. So this explanation does not fly - if your local government had "courage" to call your city as welcoming to immigrants, then sending the immigrants over there is no-brainer. You want migrants, so you get them. It should not be a problem.

Just to correct 3. The people who went to MV went there willingly because many of them were trying to get further north to places like Boston. The trip to MV was a big jump for them getting closer to their destination.

Do you have a citation for "willingly", in the informed-consent sense? I could certainly imagine that "we're going to dump you on an island with no facilities, but when they promptly boot you off you'll be a thousand miles closer to big NE cities where you'd like to be" was a deal that you could get endless numbers of migrants to sign up for, but I've not yet seen any reporting suggesting that that was how the offer was actually stated.

I have seen strong suggestions to the contrary, "Migrants Flown to Martha’s Vineyard by DeSantis Say They Were Misled" and "Migrants were promised jobs, free housing before being taken to Martha's Vineyard" and such. If that reporting is correct, IMHO "the residents of Martha's Vineyard aren't willing to personally assist migrants more than briefly, but they're still much better people than governors willing to deceive migrants for political gain" would be a pretty solid steelman.

The NY Times article finally mentions on paragraph 28 that its headline claim is disputed, though, so I'm not going to stand behind that until the dispute shakes out. This quote in USA Today, in particular: "They were handed red folders with what proved to be fake documents promising jobs and housing [...] Garcia said." ... why on Earth does that need to be qualified with "Garcia said"? We have high-bandwidth internet encircling the globe and three separate reporters collaborating on this story didn't think to so much as ask for a cellphone photo?

Martha's Vineyard is hardly a barren wasteland, and for 50 people you don't have to have too many "facilities" - any sizeable community building (and, I suspect, a number of private villas, owners willing of course) could host them for a short time.

And to think about it, if I were a migrant trying to get to, say, Boston, and they told me "we'll fly you for free within 100 miles of there, and then bring you to a place where Obama has his home, and then they'll feed you and take you further on the way - or you can spend nights under this comfortable bridge right here and hope for better options" - I'd sign up as fast as they'd let me. Literally no downside for me in this. If I knew it's a publicity stunt, even better - that means nobody would dare to mistreat me, in fear the other side would point and scream. Why would anybody need to deceive me for me to agree to something I'd want to do anyway?

A lot of the reporting seems to be downstream of this sorta thing, which has an alleged photo of at least one alleged document, and a lawyer saying :

Matt Cameron, a Boston-based immigration attorney, explained that the benefits described in the brochure are resettlement benefits available to refugees who have been referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and authorized to live in the United States. These benefits are not available in Massachusetts to the migrants who boarded the flights, who are still in the process of seeking asylum.

The migrants who boarded the planes "absolutely do not have access to cash, housing, and other resettlement benefits which are provided through both federal funds and partnerships with faith-based [organizations]," Cameron said.

On the flip side, the underlying lawyer that they're talking about seems... obviously wrong, at least in a few details. The MA Refugee Settlement Program funds are, by statute, inclusive of:

Individuals paroled as refugees or asylees under § 212(d)(5) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

Which... afaik, includes pretty much every released asylum-seeker.

Those weren’t illegal migrants from Florida, Ron Desantis picked them up in Texas and flew them to MV.

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