THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER3, 2022 11
than a thousand migrants to the nation’s
capital. All three governors plan to con-
tinue the transportations.
Implicit in their actions is the idea
that Northern, liberal attitudes regard-
ing immigration are undergirded by the
fact that the places where Northern lib-
erals live aren’t being inundated with
people who enter the country without
documentation. Governor DeSantis ap-
peared to be attempting to troll people
whose magnanimity, he seemed to be-
lieve, is inversely proportional to the ex-
tent to which a given problem has an
impact on their own lives. Indeed, much
of the discussion on the right about the
immigration crisis tends to frame it as
a “border crisis,” erroneously suggesting
both that the sole driver of the number
of people arriving is the porousness of
the Southern border and that this issue
falls squarely on the shoulders of the
states in the South and the Southwest.
DeSantis has frequently complainedCOMMENT
ISLANDMENTALITY
T
he calcified cruelty, malignant pol-
itics, and questionable legality of
the decisions by Governors Greg Ab-
bott, of Texas, and Ron DeSantis, of
Florida, to transport dozens of migrants
in Texas to unsuspecting locales in Mas-
sachusetts and Washington, D.C., reit-
erate the point—often made in recent
years—that the only check on the be-
havior of the current Republican Party
is the limits of its own imagination. Most
of the migrants reportedly came from
Venezuela, a country so racked with dis-
cord that an estimated twenty per cent
of its population has been displaced.
One man said that he arrived after hav-
ing spent three months trekking across
several countries. Many people recounted
being offered free accommodations and
flights to cities where they thought they
would be guaranteed work.
Instead, they were dispatched on two
chartered planes, arranged at DeSantis’s
behest, and unceremoniously released
on Martha’s Vineyard, the resort island
just off the coast of Massachusetts which
DeSantis called a “sanctuary jurisdic-
tion.” Others were bused to Washing-
ton, D.C., and left outside the grounds
of the U.S. Naval Observatory, where
Vice-President Kamala Harris lives, as
part of a program that Abbott, who is
running for a third term, enacted this
spring. Texas has bused more than eight
thousand migrants to Washington, New
York City, and Chicago, at a cost to the
state of more than twelve million dol-
lars. Arizona, under the Republican gov-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDAernor Doug Ducey, has also sent more
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
about an undue burden on the border
states, and expressed concern that mi-
grants arriving in those states really want
to move to his. As reported on NPR,
he said, “What we’re trying to do is pro-
file: ‘O.K., who do you think is trying
to get to Florida?’ ” What seems not to
have been factored into this thinking is
that, before the most recent crackdowns,
Florida, though not a border state, never-
theless had a long tradition of welcom-
ing certain migrants—provided that they
were fleeing Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
Buoyed by the audacity of the recent
stunts, some commentators played up
the nimby message. A headline in the
New York Post ran: “with martha’s
vineyard meltdown, Maybe Dems
will FINALLY understand ille-
gal immigration problems.” On
Fox News, Tucker Carlson ridiculed
Martha’s Vineyard as a white haven full
of people hyperventilating about the
sudden presence of so many brown peo-
ple. (A conservative online meme showed
a woman calling the police to report a
Hispanic man who was not holding a
leaf blower.) Carlson’s colleague Jesse
Watters asked Mike Pompeo, “I mean,
everybody basically that you know on
the left has a home there. Do you think
they’re going to be embracing their new
neighbors?” Pompeo, who served as
Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, said,
“You know, these are all sanctuary cit-
ies until they’re in their sanctuary.”
The island is not, of course, the mono-
chromatic enclave it’s being made out
to be. There was a Black presence there
for more than a century before the
Obamas arrived. There has been a local
chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. on Martha’s