David wrote this morning about New York City’s Mayor Adams blunt statement that unfettered immigration was going to destroy the city. It’s the clearest evidence yet that Democrats in blue cities are starting to get the idea that mass immigration is a problem and not just because people are racists. There is a real world cost associated with this and for the communities on the front lines that cost can be crippling.

Gov. Abbott deserves immense credit for making this problem manifest to blue city governors, and certainly people on the other side of the political aisle have painted him as a villain for doing this. But the fact remains that Gov. Abbott’s contribution is only a small fraction of the total number of people who are making this same journey without his assistance. Today I’m somewhat surprised to find the NY Times pointing this out.

Both the Texas governor and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have offered migrants free rides from border towns to New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and several other cities since last year. The arrivals have overwhelmed some cities, straining shelters and aid resources.

“It is abhorrent that an American elected official is using human beings as pawns in his cheap political games,” Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles said of the busing program in June.

But the reality is that the number of migrants offered free passage from Texas over the past year is a fraction of those who regularly make their way from the southern border to cities around the country — to places where there are jobs, family connections and networks of other immigrants from their homelands. And it has been that way for years…

…the migrants boarding the Texas-funded buses represent only a fraction of the thousands arriving at the border each month, and some migrants are wary of accepting a free ride.

The Texas busing program has sent about 34,740 migrants to other states since April of 2022, enough to populate a small city. But that is a paltry subset of the hundreds of thousands who have crossed the border during that period, most of whom have probably also made their way to destinations outside Texas.

So, for instance, Texas has sent about 13,000 migrants on buses to New York. But the total number of migrants who have headed to the city is around 100,000. What Gov. Abbott is doing has raised the profile of the issue but in sheer numbers it’s a small fraction of the overall problem the city is dealing with.

If that’s the case, and has been the case for years, why is NYC struggling so much now. The Times suggests it has to do with the type of migrants who are now arriving at the border. Twenty years ago, most migrants were coming in from Mexico. They were coming for jobs and because this had been going on for years they already had family or friends in the US who could help them. But over the last several years we’ve seen more and more migrants coming from Central America and now we’re getting a lot of Venezuelans from South America. These are folks who arrive here with fewer contacts, maybe none at all for the Venezuelans. They have no one to turn to for help when they arrive except the city or state. So you wind up with a situation where thousands of people who aren’t legally allowed to work under federal laws have to be fed and put up in shelters for months at a time. That’s costing NYC billions of dollars.

But again, many of these folks would be making their way to major cities with or without Gov. Abbott’s help. It’s convenient for the left and for blue city mayors to have a right-wing villain to blame this on but it’s not really a fair assessment of what is happening. The problem isn’t the buses it’s the border, which is going to pass 2 million encounters again this year. In fact, it already has but the numbers for August (about 177,000) haven’t been officially released yet. And we still have another month to go before the end of the fiscal year.

When this fiscal year is done, we probably will come in just a shade under last fiscal year’s total of 2,378,944 encounters but not by much. President Biden famously said when he took office that he didn’t want to see 2 million migrants at the border:

President-elect Joe Biden says it will take months to roll back some of President Donald Trump’s actions on immigration, offering a slower timeline than he promised on the campaign trail and one that may rile advocates pushing for speedy action on the issue…

Speaking to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said he’s already started discussing the issues with the Mexican president and “our friends in Latin America” and that “the timeline is to do it so that we in fact make it better, not worse.”

“The last thing we need is to say we’re going to stop immediately, the access to asylum, the way it’s being run now, and then end up with 2 million people on our border,” Biden said.

Well, here we are closing out FY23 and he’s done it again. If Mayor Adams and Mayor Bass want someone to blame, they should blame the president. If someone is destroying New York City that person is located in the White House not in the Texas Capitol. Take it up with Joe.