Greg Abbott’s Plan To Bus Migration From Texas To DC Will Pay Off — For Cartels

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has mastered the performing arts of border politics. That’s good for the cartel, good for his re-election efforts and terrible for America.

First, let’s take a quick step back.

Throughout the Trump administration, there was a steady flow of migrants to the US-Mexico border. In May 2019, weeks after Trump threatened to close the US-Mexico border, migrant encounters at the border rose to more than 132,000, a number not seen since 2005.

Then, in March 2020, as the country was experiencing the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used CDC’s Title 42 public health restrictions to effectively close the border. effective for most people who claim to be protected. Those seeking asylum were not processed and given the opportunity to make their case but were arrested and subsequently deported from the country. . Crucially, people without a legitimate asylum application are not detained and deported – because they were never allowed into the US in the first place.

That’s great for cartel profits. Because once they realized there were no legal consequences for Title 42 deportees, they revised their business model and sold desperate migrants the chance to act. many efforts to enter the United States. As a result, recidivism accounted for 38% of apprehensions in some months. The average over the past two years is 27%.

That makes the numbers artificially high, because the numbers include repeated attempts. In fact, after Title 42 went into effect in March 2020, encounters with migrants increased for 15 consecutive months.

In the end, gangs are making money, migrants are being put in peril, and enforcement resources are distracted from stopping the drug trade. Title 42 has failed to prevent migrants from seeking protection from applying for asylum.

Seeing an opportunity for political gain, Abbott has spent the past 18 months making a series of costly, ineffective gestures.

In March 2021, Abbott launched “Operation Lone Star”, initially deploying 500 members of the Texas National Guard to the border. By the end of that year, the governor had expanded the program massively, sending up to 10,000 members of the Guard to the border – dependent on their livelihoods and families in the process.

Security members were questioned about the mission. In December, Army Times reported that at least four soldiers involved in Operation Lone Star had died of suspected suicide in the last months of the year.

Along with this deployment already costing more than $2 billion a year — not including the additional $531 million that the Texas Department of Defense has just requested — Abbott is also trying to build its own version of the border wall.

In September, with thousands of Haitians sheltering under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, hoping to seek asylum, Abbott quickly built a “steel wall” for patrol vehicles. That didn’t seem to work, so a few months later, the “Working Steel Curtain” became a container shipping route along the Rio Grande.

However, cartels still send migrants to the border to seek asylum. So Abbott changed course to offer people crossing the border a bus ride to Washington, DC

That approach does nothing more than exacerbate the perception of chaos on the southern border. That may be good politics for his re-election campaign, but it’s bad news for Texas, much less the country.

After all, Abbott’s kabuki play is being staged alongside another very real concern: persistent and debilitating labor shortages.

Last fall, small business owners in Texas told Abbott they risked failure if they couldn’t find workers. The El Paso construction industry is struggling. Across the state, restaurants are facing labor shortages with limited hours of operation. Just this March, Abbott directed the Texas Education Authority to “immediately establish a task force to help school districts address the ongoing staff shortages they face.”

Immigrants can literally enter any of these industries overnight, but Abbot would rather use them as a political scapegoat.

Header 42 is clearly not the solution we need at the border. Ending it and implementing updated asylum policies, as the Biden administration has laid out, is one step. But real leadership needs to come from Congress – Congress has absolved itself of practically all responsibility when it comes to immigration.

The fastest way to weaken the cartel, improve border security, and address our labor shortage is for Congress to work together to create pathways to legal immigration. That way, immigrants could pay the US government thousands of dollars for safe passage instead of paying the cartel for a dangerous and deadly journey. Border security resources could be focused on smuggling drugs, guns, and money, and small businesses around the country could find the workers they need.

To reform our outdated immigration and border policies, Americans need policy solutions, not political theater.