TASHJY: Blue State blues over migrant crisis is a self-inflicted wound
Sanctuary States use higher education subsidies and other perks to incentivize illegal immigration and then cry foul when migrants actually show up at their door.
Ken Tashjy served as General Counsel for the Massachusetts Community College System for over 21 years and currently serves as a higher education attorney and consultant. He has taught as an adjunct instructor at Suffolk University since 2008, and previously at Brandeis University as a Guberman Teaching Fellow.
Massachusetts has the dubious distinction of being the only state with a Right to Shelter law. The 1983 law was originally intended to guarantee shelter for needy families with children and pregnant women who were “residents” of the state.
Fast forward 40 years and the law is now at the center of Massachusetts’ migrant crisis.
Currently, the number of families in the state’s emergency shelter system has doubled in the past year to nearly 7,000, or just over 23,000 individuals, including an estimated 11,500 illegal migrants, at a cost to taxpayers of over $45 million a month.
With space running out, many migrants are resorting to camping out in Boston’s Logan International Airport.
In response, Massachusetts Governor, Maura Healey, has declared a State of Emergency and called out the National Guard.
She is also warning migrants to stay out of Massachusetts and has implored Massachusetts’ resident who have a spare room in their home to consider hosting a migrant family.
Healey laments that the migrant crisis has forced Massachusetts to “shoulder the burden for a problem that … is not [of] the state’s making.”
Mmm, “not [of] the state’s making.” Really?
While Governor Healey attempts to dissociate herself and her policies from Massachusetts’ current crisis, it is those very policies that have attracted a tsunami of migrants and put her state in the precarious position it now finds itself.
For example, last year Healey spearheaded legislation that provides undocumented students access to in-state tuition and state financial aid when attending Massachusetts’ public colleges and universities. She also supports the use of federal stimulus money to subsidize the tuition of illegal immigrants.
Healey’s administration has advised higher education institutions to provide undocumented students with specialized staff training to increase “faculty sensitivity” to their needs, while simultaneously coaching institutions on how to be uncooperative when dealing with federal immigration officers.
During her campaign for Governor, Healey touted the multiple lawsuits she filed as the state’s Attorney General challenging then President Trump’s efforts to curb illegal immigration, including ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and blocking illegal aliens enrolled in public higher education from accessing COVID relief funds.
She also supports sanctuary city policies in her state and issuing drivers licenses to illegal alien.
So much for Healey’s claim that her state’s migrant crisis is not a problem of its own making.
Another Blue State politician having trouble reconciling his current rhetoric with his record on illegal immigration is New York City Mayor, Eric Adams.
Over the last year, New York City has experienced an unprecedented surge of over 100,000 migrants, with thousands arriving each month, at a projected cost of $12 billion.
If left unchecked, Adams predicts that the unprecedented surge of migrants “will destroy New York City,” telling New Yorkers that “the city we knew — we’re about to lose.”
To stem the avalanche of migrants flooding his city, Adams has travelled south of the border to personally warn them to go elsewhere and to stay out of the Big Apple.
Ironically, while running for mayor, Adams assured illegal aliens that New York City would remain a “sanctuary city” under his administration and proudly promoted it as a destination for illegal migrants and asylum seekers.
As part of his sanctuary policies, he too supports access to state financial aid and lower tuition rates for undocumented students and has advocated for the use of college residence halls to house migrants.
Adams has vowed that the New York City Police Department will not cooperate with federal immigration officers, and supports extending voting rights in New York City elections to non-citizens.
Up until recently, Blue State politicians, like Adams and Healey, could offer lots of free stuff to illegal immigrants and tout their sanctuary policies, knowing full well that the border states bore the blunt and strain of the immigration crisis.
They could moralize and lecture border states from afar while beating their chests and virtue signaling without ever really getting their hands dirty because it was largely someone else’s problem.
Efforts by border states or the Trump administration to curb illegal immigration and regain control over our southern sieve were characterized as racist and immoral. We were repeatedly told that there is no immigration crisis and to get over it.
Now, with migrants on the march north, states and cities located thousands of miles from the border are suddenly experiencing the dark realities of uncontrolled, mass migration.
Confronted by the crush of migrants and the perilous financial and humanitarian impact it is having on their communities, it is understandable to think that sanctuary state politicians, like Healey and Adams, would finally recognize the utter failure of their sanctuary policies.
Unfortunately, but predictably, they have not. Rather than truly acknowledging the faultiness of their own sanctuary policies and eliminating the goody bag of incentives that serves as a magnet and draws migrants to their states, Blue State politicians do what they do best, they demand more taxpayer money to fix a problem of their own making, while doubling down on their disastrous and misguided policies.
What else could explain Governor Healey’s inexplicably refusal to consider legislation repealing her state’s Right to Shelter law or limiting it to U.S. citizens, or Mayor Adams’ proposal to send up to 100 migrants to college for free at a projected cost to New York taxpayers of more than $1.2 million in the first year.
This is not a situation like a hurricane or other natural disaster, where a state rightfully needs federal assistance to recover. Rather, this is a self-inflicted crisis brought on by cynical politicians who dangle the proverbial carrot in front of migrants and then cry foul and blame others when they actually show up at their door.
Approximately 84% of the nation’s foreign-born population live in states with sanctuary policies.
Does anyone doubt that migrants would not be flooding these states if their leaders actively worked with federal authorities to detain and deport illegal immigrants, or denied them free housing, health care, tuition benefits, state financial aid or driver’s licenses?
Efforts by Blue State politicians to use their self-inflicted migrant crisis as justification for a federal bailout, in the absence of any self-reflection or self-correction, amounts to little more than a Soprano-like shake down of taxpayers and a testament to their own failed sanctuary policies.
Remember Governor Healey and Mayor Adams, you and other Blue State politicians have been scolding us for years that there is no immigration crisis. Now it is your turn to get over it.
Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
