Don’t worry: Governors abusing immigrants for good cause

Luring traumatized asylum seekers to a secluded island with promises of jobs and housing that don’t exist, and deliberately jeopardizing their legal cases, might seem pretty vile. But don’t worry! It was all for a good cause.

It was about Building Awareness of the Border Crisis, according to Republican politicians on the Sunday shows. You know, like with breast cancer ribbons, but instead of strips of pink fabric, the props were people.

Or maybe it was about sharing the “burden” of costs associated with absorbing migrants, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, R, who chartered two flights to send migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

Except wasting taxpayer dollars on expensive political stunts is a strange way to demonstrate that your state is experiencing fiscal distress. Arizona and Texas have so far spent $4 million and $12 million, respectively, on busing migrants to blue states and cities; Florida has appropriated $12 million for the purpose.

Not to mention that even the Trump administration (the Trump administration!) found that refugees and asylees are a net positive for public budgets over the long run. That is, despite typically arriving penniless, these immigrants ultimately pay more in taxes than they receive in government benefits.

Contra DeSantis’s insinuations about immigrant moochers, these are people who want to work and become economically self-sufficient. That’s presumably why DeSantis’s own henchmen promised fictitious jobs to lure the asylum seekers onto flights.

Or maybe it was all about exposing liberal hypocrisy, according to one of DeSantis’s aides.

Except if DeSantis and underlings expected a bunch of spoiled virtue-signaling libs to spurn the wretched refuse on their teeming shores, these cynical predictions were wrong: Church-goers, nonprofit volunteers, business owners, pro-bono attorneys and other locals turned up en masse, with no advance notice, to feed, clothe and shelter the migrants.

The governors of Florida and Texas have been pursuing this strategy for a while now -- including by punishing shelters and foster-care providers who serve immigrant children.

Neither these governors nor their co-partisans in Congress have shown any interest in fixing the country’s broken immigration system. That’s presumably because the problem is more valuable than the cure. Scary foreign invaders are a useful political bogeyman.

If Republican officials actually wanted to reduce the number of people coming to the border without advance permission, there are plenty of things these politicians could do. They could push for expansion of guest-worker visas, for instance. Or more funding for the refugee admissions program. Or really any other legal, orderly pathway to come to the United States.

Yes, I said legal: The families being hoodwinked and shipped around the country like chattel on chartered buses and flights are here lawfully, based on what’s been publicly reported. They turned themselves in upon crossing the border precisely so that they can apply for asylum, as is their legal right. It’s not an ideal system. Or an especially fast one. It would be much better to fix the rest of our broken legal immigration system so that those other, more orderly pathways are available. Especially the pathways that offer quicker access to work permits, given America’s current massive labor shortages.

It’s true that Democrats have also put forth relatively little effort to fix these problems. In some cases Democrats seem fearful of appearing too pro-immigrant, having apparently bought into the GOP lore that deep down Americans are xenophobes. But even what little Democrats have tried to do they generally can’t do without 60 Senate votes. Which Democrats don’t have.

Democrats need Republicans to cooperate on immigration reform, and Republicans won’t. Even when those reforms are coupled with investments in border security that Republicans claim to want. The GOP would rather keep around a dragon they can perpetually promise to slay one day -and better yet, to taunt and torture for a while, in public, first.