For a window into the chaos surrounding the current U.S. immigration policy and its enforcement flaws, you only needed to watch the late news in Chicago Wednesday night. Some 60 exhausted migrants, seemingly mostly from Venezuela, found themselves stumbling off a bus and staring into cameras outside Chicago’s Union Station.
Reporters had hustled to the station after catching wind of the latest incarnation of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” political show — busing migrants from Texas border communities to cities outside Texas, including Washington, New York and, Wednesday night, Chicago.
According to the Texas Tribune, this bit of political theater with coerced human performers has already cost Texas some $12 million, a windfall for the politically connected Wynne Transportation, but also more than enough money to give a few busloads of ambitious migrants a pretty good start to their new American life.
Abbott is frustrated. Understandably so.
He sees little federal progress on immigration issues, partly because Democrats are themselves divided about what to do about the ongoing flood of migrants at the southern border. President Joe Biden well knows that the left wing of his party wants open borders and no penalties whatsoever for the crowds of migrants crossing the borders illegally. He further knows that embracing or even dangling such a policy, which is not broadly supported by the American public, would come at an unacceptable political cost to Democrats.
Immigration reform requires frankness, compassion, broad public buy-in, clarity, incentives to follow the law and a willingness to make hard political choices. None of this has taken place in at least the last two administrations in Washington. No one has the guts to solve the problem; politicians see only the risks.
Moreover, immigration in Texas, by dint of geography, is a local issue.
“President Biden’s inaction at our Southern border community continues putting the lives of Texans — and Americans — at risk,” Abbott said in a statement dripping with sarcasm on Wednesday. “To continue providing much-needed relief to our small, overrun border towns, Chicago will join fellow sanctuary cities Washington, D.C., and New York as an additional drop-off location. Mayor Lightfoot loves to tout the responsibility of her city to welcome all regardless of legal status, and I look forward to seeing this responsibility in action as these receive resources from a sanctuary city with the resources to serve them.”
How old is Abbott — 5?
Make no mistake, this was an act of political theater and unconscionable immaturity, rendered immoral by the unpaid cast — migrants looking for a better life for their families.
And, of course, Lightfoot knew how to play her assigned role as a whole slew of people who opposed Abbott’s actions rushed to Union Station to speak their minds to waiting cameras, to pen their stories of outrage and defiance. They knew that the idea of one state busing migrants hundreds of miles to another state, without offering meaningful notice to ensure the provision of services, is not exactly a functional or humane way to handle the issue of immigration.
But they also knew that the inflamed rhetoric of how Chicago is ready to welcome anyone who arrives at the border, even via a bus from Texas, was only playing into the hands of Abbott and his many supporters in both Texas and Washington.
In essence, what we ended up with Wednesday night was a dysfunctional war of words between Democrats and Republicans, a fight between a red state and a blue city, each offering up catnip for its own partisans.
Frankly, this was more a scenario of a simmering civil war than something that should be happening in a functional and tolerant nation of diverse size and geography. For anyone interested in the development of a coherent, compassionate U.S. immigration policy, Wednesday night in Chicago was a nadir.
Let’s be clear here. U.S. immigration policy is the responsibility of the federal government and, assuming the actual provision of one, it is then the obligation of the states and cities to follow those rules. Congress must do its job.
A governor and a mayor bashing away at each other in the media has no chance whatsoever of solving this issue. All that is achieved is pointless polarization.
Meanwhile, stuck in the middle of all of this were surely decent, worried, scared families, unsure of their fate and how and where they were going to land.
Perhaps they were pleased to see the cameras filming all of the offers of support, surely a credit to our city. But the next time Abbott sends a bus to Chicago, the story will have retreated in the public consciousness. By the tenth or hundredth bus, the mayor may have other things to do than rush to Union Station to attack Texas, and those migrants won’t get the same welcome.
We welcome everyone on that bus to Chicago. Given these inhumane circumstances, they deserve all this city and state can do for them.
But we also call for an end to this interstate childishness and the urgent provision of a federal immigration policy that makes sense. That’s a whole lot harder than exchanging jabs on the news, but our political leaders are supposed to come equipped with courage — not pique and petty petulance.
Especially when they come from Texas.
