Ted Cruz's Joke Bill Finds Rare Cross-Aisle Buy-in
This week, Cruz filed the “Stop the SURGE Act,” which is what’s known as a “messaging” bill, intended to garner headlines rather than become law. It’s working! Here we are. The bill would require that undocumented immigrants at the Mexican border be transferred to new ports of entry that the bill would create far from the southwest: wealthy coastal vacation destinations such as Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket; liberal enclaves including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Palo Alto, California; and spots that troll specific political opponents of Texas’s junior senator, such as North Hero, Vermont (population 939), the location of Bernie Sanders’s lake house).
The bill won’t go anywhere, as Democrats control the House and Senate and are unlikely to spend time indulging a troll job from Cruz. But the junior senator’s point is that he believes leaders in progressive parts of the country would be aghast to see the immigrants who currently enter the country in Del Rio, Laredo, McAllen, and other parts of the border in their own communities instead.
That appears to be a misread, however. Keith Chatinover, county commissioner in Massachusetts’s Dukes County, home of Martha’s Vineyard, told his local paper that he had no problem with Cruz’s proposal. “I would love Martha’s Vineyard to become a haven for new immigrants to this country, but Senator Cruz has no idea what he’s talking about regarding a ‘border crisis,’ ” he told the Martha’s Vineyard Times, pointing out that his own community has seen an influx of immigrants from Brazil. Massachusetts state senator Julian Cyr echoed the sentiment, telling the Boston Herald that he would “welcome the opportunity to have more people come to our region and work and live.”
The Stop the SURGE Act wouldn’t exactly be sound policy. Immigrants entering the country from Mexico are more likely to have family in South Texas than in rural Vermont, and access to legal resources for those seeking asylum is similarly more robust in Texas, where organizations to meet those needs have been built over many years. But it’s rare that a handful of progressive officials find common ground with a Ted Cruz trolling attempt, so we commend him for bipartisanship.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/ted-cruz-watch/
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