Greg Abbott Schools the Biden Administration
Rich Lowery, National Review
He’s the MVP of border hawks.
Texas governor Greg Abbott will never be mistaken for Vladimir I. Lenin, but his role during the border crisis recalls the revolutionary’s famous line about “heightening the contradictions.”
It is, of course, beyond Abbott’s power to secure the border in the teeth of a determined federal policy of nonenforcement. Still, he’s used the instruments available to him to force sanctuary-city mayors to confront the consequences of their own professed beliefs on immigration and to bait the Biden administration into making its perverse priorities at the border unmistakable.
Abbott has done this with relatively small-scale initiatives that have packed a big PR and political punch.
First, as we all know, he’s been busing migrants to sanctuary cities. In the scheme of things, this has been a very minimal operation. Axios reported that, as of October, Texas had bused more than 50,000 migrants to various cities — out of the millions that have entered the country under President Biden.
Texas is touting a higher number, 100,000. Even that number is just a third of the overall Border Patrol encounters in one month alone, the record 300,000 in December.
Despite what you might believe listening to the debate, not all migrants are coming to the United States through Texas. And those migrants who do arrive in Texas aren’t all intending to stay there.
Many of them have friends and family elsewhere, including in places like New York and Chicago that were already major hubs for illegal immigrants prior to this crisis. They would head there even without a ride from Greg Abbott, and, in fact, they do.
The New York Times noted in a report a few months ago that New York City had 100,000 migrants arrive in the last year, only 13,000 of whom had been sent by Abbott.
Many of those who get the free transportation, by the way, consider themselves lucky. As the Times notes:
Many migrants have been grateful for the free transportation, because they often have little money left by the time they complete a monthslong trek to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lever Alejos, a Venezuelan delivered to Washington, D.C., last July, said, ‘I feel fortunate the governor put me on a bus to Washington.’ He has found work and started sending money and gifts to his young son back home. He recently bought a car.
Regardless, by sending a small proportion of migrants where they’d probably go anyway, Abbott has achieved a couple of things.
He’s made it easier for sanctuary-city mayors to complain about the migrants, by making himself the scapegoat. They’d presumably be much more inclined to bite their tongues if they had to point the finger at the president rather than the Texas governor. That the mayors are bemoaning the situation at all adds bipartisan credibility to the idea that this is a crisis, and they obviously undermine the concept of a sanctuary city itself by begging for fewer illegal immigrants to come to their jurisdictions.
The growing confrontation with the federal government over border security features a similar dynamic of a minor action bringing an outsized political benefit. The dispute centers on a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, Texas. Whether Texas is allowed to string barbed wire along this land or whether the federal government takes it down is not of great moment one way or another in the broader border crisis.
Yet, Abbott has managed to get the federal government in the position of actually removing physical barriers to illegal immigration at the border and insisting that it is imperative that it be permitted to continue doing so. This alone is a PR debacle for the administration, but it comes in a controversy — with its fraught legal and constitutional implications — that will garner massive attention out of proportion to its practical importance.
This is impressive by any measure.
The support of Republican states for Abbott elevates the matter further, but this also is a relatively small thing. The backing for Abbott is entirely rhetorical at this point and perhaps not very serious on the part of some Republican governors. It nonetheless serves to elevate a conflict over security on a small part of the border into what feels like a larger confrontation between all of Red America and the federal government.
None of this is to slight Abbott or the importance of the clashing visions between Texas and the feds. Rather, it is to say that Abbott has been the MVP of the border hawks over the last couple of years, and if Donald Trump rides this issue back to the White House, he should be especially grateful to Texas and its tough-minded governor.
Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review. @richlowry
