Instead of showing some heart, my governor, Dannel Malloy, is looking heartless and feckless. He claims otherwise: “Obviously, our hearts go out to the children in this situation,” his communications director said. But that is an empty piety if I’ve ever heard one. Asked by the Obama administration to temporarily house 2,000 immigrant children at a nearly vacant training school in the town of Southbury, Malloy said no. “We don’t currently have the ability to meet this request,” the same spokesman claimed.
Malloy’s administration says Southbury is too small and decrepit. Never mind that the federal government would pay for getting the facility ready for the children and for upkeep. If Southbury, built in the 1930s for developmentally disabled people, is really unusable, then Malloy should find another place for these kids. The only reason why he so far has not is politics: He is in a battle for re-election with Republican candidate Tom Foley. “The bottom line is that too many swing voters fear immigrants, and Malloy doesn’t want the ‘optics’ of hundreds of brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking children being bused into Connecticut,” the New Haven Register editorialized last week. This is just ugly. Since Malloy also faces a third-party challenger from the left, maybe he should rethink his political calculus anyway. But the bottom line is this: Why elect Democrats if they act this lily-livered when doing the right thing carries any political risk?
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