Liberals in deep blue cities far removed from America's southern border have been lecturing Republicans for years about the ideals of Emma Lazarus' poem on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The Trump administration and politicians in states like Texas, overwhelmed with the problems associated with illegal immigration, were blasted as hard-hearted xenophobes.
Hoping that the country's changing demographics would doom Republicans—the real "replacement theory"—Democrats became the party of open borders, a policy that the Biden administration implemented once it took office. The result has been a record number of illegal border crossings. Yet any concerns about the enormous toll of the growing press of illegal immigrants on America's welfare system and on the country's beleaguered working class are dismissed as racist hyperbole.
There's no sign that politicians on the Left are rethinking their support for amnesty and the opening of the border, but the mayors of New York City and Washington D.C. have discovered that these ideological chickens have finally come home to roost.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott's decision to bus illegal immigrants and asylum claimants—turned loose in his state by federal authorities—north to those Democratic strongholds has sent politicians and bureaucrats in both cities into a panic. Instead of being able to just sit back and judge Texas and Arizona—Gov. Doug Ducey has also bused immigrants to the Northeast—from a comfortable distance, they must now deal with the migrants themselves.
The result is a "humanitarian crisis" that is making it harder for Northeast liberal elites to pretend that only right-wing hatemongers worry about illegal immigration. While New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been spouting rhetoric about welcoming immigrants, he's also acting as if his city has been the victim of a dirty trick. He called Abbott's tactic "unimaginable" and "horrific." He's been begging the federal government to help him address a problem that is overwhelming a social welfare system already dealing with an out-of-control homelessness problem.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is similarly outraged. She appealed to the Biden administration to send the National Guard to help deal with the several thousand migrants who have been exiting buses from Arizona and Texas at Union Station. She was turned down by the Department of Defense on the grounds that troops are not trained to help process, feed, and deal with the sanitation problems generated by illegal immigrants. Her request was all the more ironic given the Democrats' complaints about Abbott using the Texas National Guard to deal with the border crisis.
The situation has demonstrated that Adams, the former cop turned politician, is failing to do a better job managing the city than his much-despised predecessor Bill de Blasio and that his heretofore deft public relations touch is slipping. As the New York Times reported, for all of the mayor's complaints about Abbott's grandstanding, the show Adams put on of welcoming the migrants was transparently false. Adams grabbed supplies out of the hands of volunteers so he could be shown giving them out himself. Meanwhile, witnesses said his aides were screaming at the migrants to smile at the mayor while the cameras were rolling.
Leaving aside Democratic hypocrisy, the mayors are right to assume the solution to their newfound migrant problem can only be provided by the federal government. Much as they may resent Abbott and Ducey's ploy, the person most responsible for their dilemma is in the White House, not Austin or Phoenix.
The wave of illegal immigrants is a man-made catastrophe, and the man who made it is Joe Biden. It was his endorsement of amnesty and condemnations of former president Donald Trump's effective border policies that set in motion the massive surge of illegal immigration that border states now face. His decisions to effectively shut down enforcement of the law by Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel and to entertain false accusations of brutality lodged against border patrol personnel have served as an effective green light to illegal immigrants.
The federal government should help cities cope with bused-in migrants, but not by sending them money. Instead, Biden should reverse his immigration policies and return to his predecessor's policy of sealing the border, including resuming work on the wall Trump wanted to build.
A president like Biden, who is in thrall to his party's left wing, can't even contemplate choosing the rule of law over open borders. But that is the only possible solution to illegal immigration. Until Biden sees reason, Texas and Arizona should keep busing immigrants to Democratic strongholds to remind the administration that the cost of dealing with this disaster shouldn't only be borne by their citizens.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org, a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
