Why govern when you can troll?
There are problems with the immigration system, none of which will be solved by Ron DeSantis' trolling.
Pretty much everything that can possibly be said about what was wrong with Ron DeSantis’ Martha’s Vinyard stunt has already been said, and I agree with most of it. So allow me to play Republican’s Advocate for a moment:
The number of people DeSantis flew to Massachusetts is barely a rounding error compared to the number of people who cross the Mexico-Texas border every day, and many liberals are at best indifferent to it.
Sending people elsewhere in the vast United States of America while they wait for their immigration cases to be processed is probably better, in principle, than leaving them to sleep under bridges in El Paso.
People in Martha’s Vinyard stepped up to care for these unexpected new arrivals, and God Bless them for it. But while liberals pat themselves on the back for showing what compassionate people they are, many churches and community groups in Texas have been doing the same, day in and day out, for a much larger number of new arrivals, for years, with few New York Times profiles.
Flying people to Martha’s Vinyard is not the Holocaust. It is not mass internment of Japanese-Americans. I'm skeptical that it falls within the orbit of human trafficking laws, though it’s always a really bad sigh when you’re asking if a government action could be considered a violation of human trafficking laws.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Rigid Thinking to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.