Refugees drop by DC
Four boats carrying more than 100 asylum seekers have turned up since Labor was elected – the most vessels in a single month since 2015. They were all intercepted, but sooner or later one or two boats might make it through. And then the dormant refugee compassion industry will fire back up, demanding Australia welcome whoever’s on board. No passports? No problem.
Anyone who opposes their immediate settlement will, of course, be demonised as a wicked racist.
But here’s the thing about our refugee-friendly folk. They tend to live in nice suburbs that throughout
Labor’s previous asylum-seeker waves never experienced a significant presence of asylum seekers.
Nor, for that matter, are they troubled by the impact of large-scale legitimate refugee immigration – for the simple reason that few Somalis or Sudanese have the cash required to live in Greens or teal electorates.
What might happen, though, if it became government policy to deliver thousands of refugees and immigrants to, say, Sydney’s eastern suburbs?
Or to Melbourne’s leafier, wealthier zones? Or any inner-city area with “refugees are welcome here” signs?
Residents might suddenly discover that they have more urgent concerns than global temperatures 100 years from now.
They’d likely complain about it. We know this to be the case because just such a relocation experiment is currently underway in the US.
Cities and towns along the Mexican border in Arizona and Texas have been swamped with illegal immigrants ever since President Joe Biden cancelled a Trump policy allowing border patrol officers to quickly expel undocumented arrivals.
More than 2000 illegals are now being apprehended every day in the Texan town of Eagle Pass – which, with a population of barely 30,000, obviously cannot cope with that number of refugees.
In Yuma, Arizona, the number of what are described as migrant “encounters” has increased by more than 2000 per cent since Biden came to power.
Overall, US Customs and Border Protection expects to make two million arrests by September, on top of more than 1.7 million arrests during the previous year. That total is pushing towards twice the population of Brisbane. All in just two years.
And the pressure to deal with it falls on places like Eagle Pass, Yuma and Del Rio, which late last year found itself hosting a tent city of some 15,000 people – about half the size of Del Rio itself.
Anyone who complains about this is, as in Australia, denounced as hateful and racist.
In 2019, Karine Jean-pierre – now President Biden’s press secretary – wrote that ex-president Donald Trump’s border wall was “bigoted”.
Jean-pierre lives in Washington DC, a caring, compassionate, Democrat-dominated city that a few years ago declared itself to be a “sanctuary city” for migrants.
“We protect the rights and humanity of all our residents, and our DC values and our local culture are guided by a celebration of diversity and inclusivity,” Mayor Muriel Bowser announced in 2018.
“That is why we created the Immigrant Justice Legal Services grant program so that immigrants in Washington, DC have access to the resources they need to understand their rights and find legal support.”
Of course, it’s easy to say all the lovely things about migrants when you’re nearly 3000km from the border.
So, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Arizona counterpart Doug Ducey, both Republicans, came up with a plan.
If DC loves diversity and inclusivity so much, they’d give them a chance to show it – by sending thousands of border-hoppers directly to the heart of Washington.
They loaded them onto hundreds of buses and delivered them to the US capital.
Did Washington celebrate? No way, Jose.
Mayor Bowser whined that her city’s homeless shelters were quickly overwhelmed by the new arrivals. She described the situation as a “crisis” and asked that the National Guard be deployed to deal with it.
“The pace of arriving buses and the volume of arrivals have reached tipping points,” Bowser wrote. ”With pledges from Texas and Arizona to continue these abhorrent operations indefinitely, the situation is dire.”
So the arrival of migrants is now “abhorrent”. Doesn’t sound very diverse or inclusive, does she?
Few in border states were moved by Bowser’s howling. “Mayor Bowser is lamenting 4000 migrants,” Governor Ducey responded online. “Arizona had 43,570 border encounters in June alone.”
“If 4000 is a tipping point,” asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz, “what the hell do you call the three and a half million illegal immigrants who’ve crossed our southern border?”
Texan politician Chip Roy was even more dismissive towards DC’S mayor. “You know what, cry me a frickin’ river,” he said. “Welcome to the party, pal.”
Giving Washington a taste of border life appears to have worked. Last week the US government – led by a bloke who in 2020 promised “not another foot” of Trump’s border wall would be added under his watch – announced it would begin filling gaps in the wall.
And the person who had to take questions about this change of policy was none other than Karine JeanPierre, the gal who just three years ago called the wall “bigoted”.
“We are cleaning up the mess the prior administration made,” she told media, gamely spinning a broken vow into a noble cause.
To the likes of Jean-pierre and Australia’s refugee cheerleaders, illegal immigrants are wonderful. Just so long as they know their place.
And that place is somewhere else.