Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Opinion: Ron DeSantis Is Making an Asylum Crisis of His Own
NY TimesNo Paywall
When nearly 50 migrants were lured onto a pair of planes in San Antonio and dumped on Martha’s Vineyard this month, a sequence of events arranged by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, it was an escalation of what his fellow Republican governor, Greg Abbott of Texas, has been doing since spring: sending busfuls of migrants to “sanctuary” jurisdictions, ostensibly to protest what they call President Biden’s “open borders” immigration policy.
Mr. DeSantis’s stunt wasn’t meant as a policy critique. If it had been, he would have had to acknowledge that — by the logic he and other immigration hawks have been using for years — he was encouraging future migration by (falsely) promising jobs and government benefits to migrants.
But even trollish stunts have consequences for policy debates. The broader the attacks by the Republican governors, the narrower the space of alternative policies they could support. By refusing to articulate what America ought to be doing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Mr. DeSantis is painting himself and his party into a corner — where the only acceptable position will be rejecting the principle of asylum entirely.
Asylum has become a policy problem for both parties. The Biden administration is attempting to address complaints — like those Republicans have made in the past — that the system takes too long to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate asylum seekers. Republicans, meanwhile, are gleefully erasing any distinction between the two.
Mr. DeSantis’s stunt wasn’t meant as a policy critique. If it had been, he would have had to acknowledge that — by the logic he and other immigration hawks have been using for years — he was encouraging future migration by (falsely) promising jobs and government benefits to migrants.
But even trollish stunts have consequences for policy debates. The broader the attacks by the Republican governors, the narrower the space of alternative policies they could support. By refusing to articulate what America ought to be doing on the U.S.-Mexico border, Mr. DeSantis is painting himself and his party into a corner — where the only acceptable position will be rejecting the principle of asylum entirely.
Asylum has become a policy problem for both parties. The Biden administration is attempting to address complaints — like those Republicans have made in the past — that the system takes too long to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate asylum seekers. Republicans, meanwhile, are gleefully erasing any distinction between the two.