Desantis plays a cynical game over immigration

If you're a southern politician who wants to be president, there's nothing like standing up to those sanctimonious northern hypocrites. Even better if you can do it by persuading migrants to be your props.

So it was for Gov. Ron Desantis of Florida, who chartered planes to fly newly arrived Venezuelans from Florida to Martha's Vineyard, an affluent island community off the coast of Massachusetts. The point was to antagonize progressives who support liberal immigration.

The islanders were kind. Before the migrants were moved to a nearby military base, folks brought clothes, provided food, offered advice on jobs. Desantis would have preferred a lesser reception. Then he could say: “See. See. They don't want them there any more than we do here!”

Desantis likes being agent provocateur. It's true that tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants from Latin America are crossing the border and seeking asylum. Southwestern states bear the burden, especially Texas. Flying them north, though, isn't going to solve a vexing problem.

But if you're Desantis, there's nothing like sticking a finger in the eye of those who don't have to deal with them.

Desantis wants to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, and this kind of escapade gives him publicity and plays to Donald Trump's MAGA crowd.

It's exquisitely cynical. The playbook: Lie to vulnerable people. Don't tell them where they're going. Make empty promises of a better future. Exploit their misery.

Southern segregationists did very much the same thing in the early 1960s.

This isn't new. Southern segregationists did very much the same thing in the early 1960s. They sold poor Blacks on the idea of going north, which millions had been doing for decades in the Great Migration. They put them on buses with the promise of jobs and homes. They were called “reverse freedom riders” — a reference to the army of Black and white activists who rode buses into the South to integrate interstate travel.

Many were attacked and beaten by members of the Klan when they arrived at segregated bus stations. The police watched and shrugged. One of the celebrated reverse freedom riders was Lela Mae Williams, who was given a one-way bus ticket for her and her nine youngest children from rural Arkansas. They were among several dozen Black people sent to Hyannis on Cape Cod, near Martha's Vineyard. This was no accident; nearby Hyannis Port is the summer home of the Kennedys.

Williams was told that John F. Kennedy would meet her. Minutes from their destination, she asked the driver to stop so she could change for the president. She had dignity. So there she was, near the Kennedy compound, wearing a black dress, a white hat and a triple strand of pearls, as if dressed for church.

The president wasn't there, but the cameras were, arranged by Amis Guthridge, the segregationist lawyer from Little Rock who was behind the scheme. Of course, there was no job for any of them. As the Kennedy Library tweeted last week, the purpose was “to embarrass northern liberals and humiliate Black people.”

Instead of sending buses to Hyannis, as the segregationists did in 1962, their spiritual heirs charter planes to Martha's Vineyard. (It isn't just there. Texas and Arizona have sent 10,000 or so immigrants to Washington, where some ended up at Vice-president Kamala Harris's residence).

The reverse freedom riders were the last gasp of a spent regime. They lived lives of hatred, and this was how they operated.

But as they could not stop integration, this will not stop immigration. This time, though, it's not just the Klan behind this. It's the state. This isn't a personal vendetta, it's an institutional one. The migrants are now suing Desantis and Florida for deceiving them. This little piece of late-summer theatre surprises no one in a country where nothing is ever settled, nothing is too much, and cruelty has become the new political currency.