Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times via AP
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to a crowd of supporters on August 24, 2022.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s decision to send dozens of Venezuelan refugees from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard has turned into a major controversy. Republicans have been sending buses of immigrants to blue states for some time now, but this was something different. A woman calling herself “Perla” reportedly lied outright to the refugees, telling them that there were work permits and housing ready for them on the island. There were none, and neither did DeSantis’s goons call ahead to warn any officials on the island.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has since attempted to one-up DeSantis by sending numerous busloads of refugees (including a one-month-old baby) to Vice President Harris’s official residence, as well as to New York City, again without any advance warning.
That’s the conservative movement for you: gleeful, depraved cruelty as part of a political stunt to distract from their own horrible policies and candidates.
One part of the context here, of course, is Republicans’ boiling anti-immigrant xenophobia. Donald Trump launched his 2016 presidential campaign in a speech smearing people who crossed the Mexican border: “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said. He subsequently shot to the top of the polls and eventually won the primary.
But the more important reason for these stunts is the upcoming midterm elections. On the one hand, DeSantis and Abbott clearly want to run for president in 2024, and that will require assembling a record of vindictive anti-immigrant cruelty and owning the libs to match Trump. Lying to a bunch of penniless refugees in order to pack them off to Kamala Harris’s house or a famous vacation spot for wealthy liberals fits the bill. Tucker Carlson may even have inspired the idea with a segment some months ago.
On the other hand, Republican political fortunes are currently sinking thanks in part to their assault on reproductive rights and habit of nominating paint-blisteringly extreme candidates. Since the right-wing Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, and most Republican states have de facto banned all abortions, Republicans’ position on the general congressional ballot has sunk, Biden’s approval numbers are up, and women’s voter registration is surging. Senate races in Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and perhaps even Ohio are in danger thanks to Republican base voters nominating lunatic celebrities who have never held elected office.
Republicans’ go-to strategy in such a situation, or indeed during any election, is to whip up a distracting xenophobic frenzy. In 2014, it was the Ebola outbreak, which Republicans portrayed as a dire threat to Americans, and harshly criticized all of President Obama’s (successful) efforts to contain it. In 2018, they focused on the “migrant caravan” of refugees moving up toward the border from Central America, howling that it was an “invasion” and possibly full of ISIS terrorists.
The mainstream media typically indulges Republican tantrums, but only to a point. In 2014, it worked perfectly; if anything, coverage of the Ebola outbreak was even more unhinged on mainstream news than it was in conservative outlets. In 2018, big outlets granted extensive coverage to the migrant caravan—until the final days of the campaign, when a right-wing terrorist, citing a conspiracy theory that Jewish philanthropic groups were helping the caravan in a plot to turn America nonwhite, massacred 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, and a die-hard Trump supporter mailed numerous pipe bombs to prominent liberals. We “did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible, because for seven days nobody talked about the elections,” Trump complained in a speech later.
According to ratified international treaties, it is legal for people to apply for asylum at the American border.
This time, the overstepping didn’t come from random lunatics but an elected one. Busing refugees to big blue cities, which have extensive support systems and already contain substantial immigrant communities, is one thing, but DeSantis sending them to an isolated island with a permanent population of about 17,000 is quite another. Immigration lawyers told reporters that Department of Homeland Security officials had submitted fraudulent addresses of random homeless shelters across the country for the refugees—including one in Tacoma, Washington—meaning they would be required to report to ICE offices hundreds or thousands of miles away within days or be deported. The gratuitous cruelty was simply undeniable.
DeSantis may also have committed a crime. There are a number of laws that would seem to prohibit shipping people across state lines on a false pretext, and the refugees’ lawyers argue that the stunt violated their clients’ civil rights. The Florida law creating this program (paid for with interest from the American Rescue Plan state fiscal aid, by the way) indicates that people are supposed to be taken from Florida itself, not other states.
Whatever the case, Martha’s Vineyard residents—mostly upper-middle- and working-class folks by this point in the year, because the rich vacationers have already left—did not behave as conservatives assumed. On the contrary, they immediately stepped up to help the refugees with food, lodging, medical care, and legal assistance. Afterward, they were sent to Boston, because there are far more jobs and housing available there, and most wanted to go to big cities anyway. (Naturally, conservative media ignored the kindly treatment, and screamed that sending them away from the island was somehow deporting them.)
It should be emphasized that according to ratified international treaties, it is legal for people to apply for asylum at the American border, and these Venezuelans—fleeing a ruined economy, criminal gangs, drug traffickers, and so on—almost certainly qualify. The reason they haven’t gotten refugee status yet is a paperwork train wreck in the immigration bureaucracy that has made it nearly impossible to get the requisite forms processed. Trump and his racist goons wrecked the asylum system, but Biden has not yet fixed it, to his discredit.
It’s also the case that America is suffering a serious labor shortage across the board. In a sane country, these folks would have been welcomed in with open arms, and businesses would be elbowing each other out of the way to offer them jobs. Alas, in America sanity is quite far off—and if Republicans win this November, things will only get worse.
