Last week Mayor Muriel Bowser revealed that she had requested help from the National Guard to deal with the influx of migrants coming from Texas and Arizona. The Mayor complained that the “pace of arriving buses and the volume of arrivals have reached tipping points.”

Now that this problem is having an impact on the East Coast, where the NY Times has a lot of readers, they’ve decided to address it. I shouldn’t be surprised by the tone of this article but I am. The way this is presented is completely sympathetic to the mayor who is being put upon by those mean Republican governors from border states.

A political tactic by the governors of Texas and Arizona to offload the problems caused by record levels of migration at the border is beginning to hit home in Washington, as hundreds of undocumented migrants arriving on the governors’ free bus rides each week increasingly tax the capital’s ability to provide emergency food and housing.

With no money and no family to receive them, the migrants are overwhelming immigrant nonprofits and other volunteer groups, with many ending up in homeless shelters or on park benches. Five buses arrived on a recent day, spilling young men and families with nowhere to go into the streets near the Capitol…

“This is a crisis created by Republican leaders in other states, however, unfortunately it’s fallen on the mayor to allocate resources locally,” said Brianne Nadeau, the council member who prepared the letter.

There’s a problem with that 2nd paragraph above but you get the idea. Eventually, the author gets around to mentioning that it’s not as if things would be any different if all of these folks had remained in Texas and Arizona.

While thousands of migrants have been swiftly expelled under a pandemic-related health order known as Title 42, thousands of others are being allowed into the country to pursue asylum claims because they cannot be returned to Mexico or their own countries…

The situation has become acute in recent weeks with the arrival of so many Venezuelans, who cannot be expelled under Title 42 because Mexico will not take them and their own government does not have an agreement with the United States to accept deportation flights. And unlike most migrants from Mexico and Central America who have family and friends in the United States, Venezuelans often arrive with no money and nowhere to go.

The situation would be exactly as bad as it is now if the busses weren’t running. The only difference is that now the mayor of Washington, DC is having to face a small fraction of the overall impact the border states routinely experience. Near the end of the story we get a quote from one of the migrants making it very clear who is actually to blame for the current problem.

Many Venezuelans have said that they made the journey to the United States because they believed that the country’s doors were open.

“On TikTok we saw that people were easily getting into the United States,” said Yennifer Ortiz, who made the trip with her partner, Luis Moreno, and their 5-year-old daughter, Sofia.

Like migrants from all over Central America, the message they have been hearing is that the border is open. And the reason people believe that is because it’s effectively true. Migrants either know or quickly learn that by bringing along children and or by claiming asylum they will be allowed into the country for a year or more while their case is adjudicated. Even if a judge eventually denies their claim, which is what happens the majority of the time, the border patrol will never be sent to deport them unless they commit a crime.

Even if they do commit a crime, progressive DAs in major cities will bend over backwards to ensure they aren’t charged with a deportable crime. So, for instance, a felony crime of drug dealing could be knocked down to a misdemeanor of accessory. They might go through the system 5 or ten times this way and still not have any risk of being deported. Even if they are eventually charged with a felony and convicted, sanctuary cities won’t work with the border patrol to allow them to pick up these illegal immigrants. So, really, the chances of anyone ever being deported once they arrive is very slim.

I have a lot of sympathy for Venezuelans who’ve had their lives ruined by socialist dictators back home. Maybe some of them have a legitimate claim to asylum. But for the most part, these are economic migrants gaming the system and the Biden administration is allowing it to continue. Why shouldn’t Washington, DC be asked to foot some of the bill?

Finally, I can’t help but notice some the top comments on this article (meaning they’ve been upvoted by other readers) make a lot of sense.

“A vast majority of recent bus riders are Venezuelans fleeing their crisis-ridden country” So they traveled through at least six countries (where they share a common language and culture) to come to America for better benefits? This is not a refugee problem, this is a gaming-the-system problem and has to stop.

This guy is clearly not a Trump fan but thinks he had a point on controlling the border.

The system needs to change

1. EVERYONE who is not legally entitled to enter the country should be denied entry at the border. Full stop. Zero tolerance

2. All asylum claims should be made at the the American embassy in the claimants home country.

3. Trump was an imbecile and I voted against him twice but directionally, when it came to border security, he was absolutely correct. We need to adopt a zero tolerance policy on illegal immigration.

It’s a shame the authors at the NY Times can’t make a few of these points.

It’s a stunt but it is a politically effective stunt that does make a point. The great majority of these people are economic migrants with no credible asylum claims. They should have been deported immediately.

Last one:

If NYC and DC are overwhelmed already, you can understand how much more overwhelmed Texas cities are facing ten times as many migrants monthly. It is past time for a unified national approach that distributes the burden of our immigration policy equally, or revises that policy asap.

Exactly right. Maybe it’s time to start busing some of these migrants to Boston or Vermont and see how long it takes before they are complaining too.