The immigration crisis in Denver and other large cities — all of them, not so coincidentally, run by Democrats — is altogether real.
And, at the same time, it’s shockingly phony.
If that sounds confusing, that’s because those who have both fomented and exploited this crisis — starting with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose unscheduled busing of unprepared asylum-seeking immigrants from his state to purposely unprepared so-called sanctuary cities is a textbook case of wanton political cruelty — want you to be confused.
They — by whom I mean Donald Trump and the rest of MAGA world — couldn’t be happier to hear Mayor Mike Johnston announce that Denver will have to make cuts in city services to provide existential services for tens of thousands of immigrants who have been dumped on Denver. I’m glad to report that Denver understands its responsibility to care for those Abbott clearly doesn’t care about.
As if to make the point, Abbott has been laying down killing razor wire in the Rio Grande and is using National Guardsmen to block Border Patrol agents from doing their job. And when Democratic mayors attempt to stop the buses from coming, Abbott starts moving the immigrants by air.
They couldn’t be happier that mayors in Denver and New York and Chicago and elsewhere are demanding that Joe Biden and Congress take action to relieve the burden on their cities, having caused not only chaos but, more to the point, a split in the Democratic Party. For his work, a Houston Chronicle editorial mockingly called Abbott a “genius.”
They couldn’t care less that Denver now has the highest number of migrants per capita than any city, stretching every imaginable city service, from schools to hospitals to shelters for the unhoused to food for the unfed. As many as 40,000, most of them from Venezuela, have arrived over the past year. It has reached the point that the state legislature’s Joint Budget Committee is now considering moving as much as $24 million in state funds to cover costs absorbed by schools during the immigration influx.
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Yes, the crisis is real.
They couldn’t be happier to see a Wall Street Journal headline saying that Denver is “furious that Washington can’t fix the border.” The story, but not the headline, explains the fury, which is toward congressional Republicans, who first demanded that aid for Ukraine and Israel be tied to border-security legislation and then, because Trump ordered it, killed a bipartisan border-security bill. It’s a bill, not incidentally, that would have gone a long way toward fixing what Johnston called “the humanitarian crisis in this city.”
The bill would have provided much-needed funding — as much as $1.4 billion — for services in overextended cities like Denver. It would have expedited, as city mayors have demanded, work permits for immigrants, who, as Johnston said, want nothing more than to work. It would have also made it easier — as Republicans wanted — to deny asylum requests and also to return anyone denied asylum to their home countries. It would have shut down the border if crossings averaged more than 5,000 a day for a week. What it wouldn’t have done, at Republican request, was provide any real immigration reform, any path to citizenship, any help for the DACA Dreamers.
Johnston said people in Denver were not only furious, but heartbroken, when the GOP shot down the border bill, noting simply this: “If that measure had succeeded, there wouldn’t be a crisis.”
Yes, the crisis is phony.
But as Trump has made clear, he wants an immigration crisis, up to and including the chaos at the border. With the economy improving, immigration is now the centerpiece of Trump’s campaign, with all the polling showing Trump leading Biden bigly on this issue. Trump has already offered up his, uh, solution, which involves massive detention camps and sweeping raids of millions of undocumented immigrants in their homes and places of work and mass deportations and bans on migrants from Muslim-majority countries and tightened limits on asylum and the deputation of National Guardsmen from Trump-friendly red states. And, of course, finishing the useless wall.
For the crises — both real and phony — they want you to blame, in this order:
— The migrants themselves. They would be Donald Trump’s rapists and murderers who would “poison the nation’s blood.” If that’s not Nazi enough for you, Trump also says “these aren’t people. These are animals.” They’re Lauren Boebert’s disease-carrying invaders. They’re Sen. J.D. Vance’s would-be “Democrat (sic) voters pouring into the country.” They’re Tucker Carlson’s would-be brown replacers of white people who make “our country poorer, dirtier and more divided.”
— Joe Biden. Of course, Joe Biden, whom they want to impeach, along with his Homeland Security secretary. Of course, Biden, who happens to be president and, therefore, in all likelihood the match for the expected repeat showdown with Trump. And so Republicans like Speaker-for-now Mike Johnson (not to be confused with Mayor Mike Johnston) says a border-security bill is unnecessary —- despite having said for years that the crisis required immediate legislation — and that Biden already has all the tools at his disposal to solve the problem.
— Democrats in general, those governing so-called sanctuary cities in particular. Like many other cities, Denver’s sanctuary status involves not allowing undocumented immigrants to be kept in custody due to their status and requiring federal authorities to obtain an arrest warrant. Abbott claims that he simply wants these welcoming cities to share the burden that states like Texas bear. But, of course, he buses migrants to these cities with no warning, often in the middle of the night, to create as much chaos — despite whatever collateral harm comes to the migrants, including children — as possible. He isn’t looking to share. He’s looking to harm.
Even today, many schools still teach that America is a nation of immigrants. Like many of you, I am the grandchild and great-grandchild of immigrants. Some schools may even still teach that immigration has been a boon to America, to its culture, to its diversity, even to its economy.
To the economic point, Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell cites a recently released nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report, which forecast that the unexpected surge in immigrants to the U.S. will produce a much-needed infusion of younger workers to counter the coming retirements of what has become an aging population. CBO Director Phil Swagel writes that “we estimate that, from 2023 to 2034, GDP will be greater by about $7 trillion and revenues will be greater by about $1 trillion than they would have been otherwise.”
A trillion here and a trillion there and pretty soon, as the saying sort of goes, you’re talking real money. Rampell cites other reports that also show large benefits. You don’t have to believe me. Read the column.
And if you don’t believe the numbers, you can still believe the costs — and not just the anticipated $180 million that Denver may have to spend on this crisis by the end of the year.
When Johnston announced the $5 million in cuts to the DMV and Parks & Recreation, he cited the tragic story of a Venezuelan family on its long, punishing trip to the border and, eventually, to Denver.
The family, as reported in The Sun, had been climbing a mountain pass when the 8-year-old reached for a dog standing too close to the cliff’s edge.
“And the dog goes over the edge. And the child goes over the edge. And the mom goes over the edge chasing that child and that dog, and the dad is standing there watching his entire family be lost in a matter of seconds,” Johnston said. “Those folks get up the next day, and keep walking and keep walking and keep walking until they get to this country.”
He would add: “And they have asked for nothing but the ability to work and support themselves.”
Those are real costs to real people who don’t belong to cartels, who aren’t drug mules, who are not unlike the immigrants who came before them and who came before us, looking for a better life. In Denver, many want to work and, if they had permits, could find ready jobs.
This is not about open borders. We can’t have open borders. This is about a humanistic border policy that doesn’t villainize, about humanistic immigration reform that doesn’t force millions to live outside the law, about humanistic immigration laws that befit our nation and its history and about the end of an inhuman and cruel campaign to poison the relations between one set of people and another.
And, as we know too well, this crisis is about forcing the people of Denver to make the kinds of choices they should never have to make.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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