On New York's Migrant Crisis
How Operation Lone Star is giving Mayor Eric Adams the vapors
NYC Mayor Eric Adams seems incapable of handling the NYC migrant crisis. Elected largely on a mandate of bridging the gaps between the NYPD and communities of color, Adams seems politically overwhelmed by the magnitude of the sheer numbers of the asylum seekers. Roughly 100,000 new migrants have come to the city since Spring; the shelter population has doubled. “Never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to. I don’t see an ending to this,” Adams said last night, defeat rising in his voice. Unfortunately, the inability of the Mayor — or even the Governor — to respond to the Republican "sanctuary city" line of attack seems guaranteed to make it a major issue next election.
There is a reason why New York has become something of a laboratory for Republican dirty tricks. New York’s “red wave” in the 2022 midterms made Kevin McCarthy’s dysfunctional House happen. “In the midterm elections, one of the bluest states in the country saw a relative red wave that led to a net gain of three seats, helping give the GOP its razor-thin majority,” summarized Brian Mann in an election postmortem on NPR. Relentless hammering on the crime narrative worked in 2022. Former Gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, who campaigned almost exclusively on a dystopian post-COVID narrative, was aided by the 5 O'clock news, the daily tabloids and right-wing media to come within spitting distance of Albany. But as crime statistics now show irrefutable declines, the Republican party has moved to breathless coverage of the migrant crisis, particularly, of late, on how those vicious migrant children are ruining public schools.
Governor Abbott of Texas must be so proud. Many of these asylum seekers have been bused on on Abbott’s orders. His weaponization of the border crisis has driven NYC Mayor Eric Adams to the vapors. Abbott’s introduction of naught else but utter chaos to the immigration system — so on-brand for the Republican party — is going along swimmingly. From the Texas Tribune:
(Jeronimo Cortina, an associate professor of political science at the University of Houston) said the busing program will be popular among the far-right enclave of the GOP party, particularly those in former President Donald Trump’s voter base. Trump, after all, was one of the first to raise the idea of busing migrants to so-called sanctuary cities, saying in 2019 that Democrats were “unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws.”
“If you’re talking about the MAGA GOP, I think it’s going to be extremely, extremely, extremely popular,” Cortina said. “I mean, it’s one of the greatest hits, perhaps within their top five policy preferences.”
And the subsequent fighting with the mayor of a city that looms large in the imagination of a lot of conservative Texans is an added bonus. Adams has at times played into that with his criticism.
Using the fentanyl crisis as a cover, migrants are being arrested — sometimes for weeks — out the sheer cruelty of it all. And then there is Governor Abbott’s love of razor wire to defend our borders. Even as Eric Adams, political hack, plays right into Governor Abbott’s hands, some residents of Texas wonder — has this cruel, cruel game gone too far? A couple of residents in Eagle Pass, Texas — Republican country — seem to think so. Uriel J. Garcia for the Texas Tribune writes of Magali Urbina and her husband, Hugo, who bought a 400-acre pecan farm along the border:
Urbina, a Republican who said she voted for Abbott for reelection, said the day it became too much came on a late-July afternoon when she spotted a pregnant woman cross the Rio Grande and push her way through the concertina wire. The woman’s arms were cut and bloodied. Urbina said she called nearby Border Patrol agents, who cut through the state’s fence to reach the woman.
When a few state troopers approached, the 52-year-old retired elementary school teacher sternly told them, “Back off. This is my property and she is going to get through.” An ambulance took the pregnant woman away.
There are still decent Republicans in Texas. Good for her. And thank heaven for District Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan-era appointee, if you want to know how far to the cruel right the Republican party has come. “Governor [Greg] Abbott [R] announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” Ezra wrote. “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.” Governor Abbott, of course, knows that. The razor wire and serrated metal plated buoys are the merely sinister performative props for a party in which cruelty is the point. The U.S. Justice Department has contended for months that the Governor violated federal law by deploying the barriers near Eagle Pass, without first getting clearance from the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees all navigable waterways in the US. “Great first step toward checking Abbott's deadly cruelty and impunity,” tweeted Beto O’Rourke this afternoon.
Eric Adams was also elected, two years into the COVID crisis, to bring some semblance of order to a distressed city. Which makes his exasperated plea last night so difficult to process. Even Rosanne Barr is laughing at him. Mayor Adams, who retired from the NYPD after 20 years with the rank of Captain, should be on top of this issue of public order. He should be marshalling all of the volunteer and religious organizations to help provide for the immigrants where the federal government fails the city. He should be explaining to any and all within hearing distance that each borough will be called upon to do its part. That we are a city of immigrants. That America was founded as a beacon of liberty over tyranny. And he should be using his tremendous bully pulpit as Mayor of the world’s media capital to shame legislators into passing comprehensive immigration reform, like the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which Ronald Reagan signed.
But Adams is not doing any of that. And neither, quite frankly, is Governor Hochul. In fact, both seem to lack the political versatility and will to deal with this moment. Make no mistake about it, however — the Republicans smell blood in the water. The 1,000 unit Asylum Center at the site of the Creedmoor Psychiatric center in the heart of New York’s 3rd Congressional district is on their radar. As I posted earlier in the week, posters are turning up throughout George Santos’s district concerning the center and home values. The Archie Bunker argument, I called it, because anxiety over the property value of the fictional Bunker house at 704 Hauser Street in Queens as well as race were recurring themes of the show. One of the big questions of the 2024 election Republicans will be asking in NY3 will be how the Asylum center affects their sense of safety and their residential property values.
If the Republicans have any say in it, 2024 will be a national migrant emergency referendum on the Biden administration and the big cities. A pivot away from Supreme Court’s controversial abortion ruling. It has the added advantage of pitting America’s smaller counties against the bigger ones, a Republican electorate sweet spot, to be sure. The migrant issue also has essentially the same template as the crime issue, interestingly enough. It conjured in the conservative imagination lawless people of color coming, in hordes, to rape our virginal American daughters. The GOP can just dust off all those breathless superPAC all-crime-all-the-time ads from 2022 and replace crime with metaphors for migrants.
Perhaps, this time, bacterial?
“The museum staff equivalent in the film business are the CEOs and executives at studios and streaming services. They are charged with protecting the art of film and television series. But at this moment, it does not feel like this particular “staff” is looking after this art at all. None of them are telling others, “Don’t touch the art.” This is one of the many reasons the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are currently on strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the group that represents these CEOs. “ (Justine Bateman/Fast Company)
“Bongo was placed under house arrest and several of his close associates, including his son, Eton-educated Noureddin Bongo Valentin, were arrested for treason, embezzlement and corruption. The details of those charges remain unclear, but the Bongo regime has been labeled a kleptocracy by experts and advocacy groups throughout its existence.A one-time musician, Ali Bongo came to power in 2009 after the death of his father Omar Bongo, whose nearly 42-year authoritarian rule was aided by his closeness to the former colonizer, France, and his use of Gabon’s petrodollars to build a network of patronage. Choice appointments such as cabinet positions went to trusted family members, and the father and son amassed vast wealth while presiding over a small population of 2.3 million.” (Micah Reddy/ICIJ)
“Unions and their allies are ramping up efforts to convert an extraordinarily challenging demographic: low-wage workers in the anti-union South. They’re trying unorthodox approaches that they hope can reverse decades of organizing failures. That includes organizing employees across different workplaces, wooing workers to join labor groups without traditional shop-by-shop elections and in some cases, taking direct strike action on employers.” (Olivia Olander/Politico)
“The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation. One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.” (Elizabeth Kolbert/TNY)