It’s an old phenomenon, municipalities with full landfills end up transporting their garbage — although always under contract — to other jurisdictions. Such was the case years ago when Toronto decided to truck its garbage all the way to Michigan state. After all, locally no one wanted a landfill in their backyard. In very recent years, there have been examples of provinces or states doing the same thing, but this time with human beings.
In Canada, this happened when former Alberta premier Ralph Klein cut welfare rates in the 1990s and offered one-way bus tickets to welfare recipients to travel to sunny British Columbia (B.C.). A similar incident occurred in 2016 in Saskatchewan when two young homeless First Nations men were each given one-way bus tickets by Social Services from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, to Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. Needless-to-say, the B.C. provincial and municipal governments were not too happy about any other jurisdictions’ policies to simply dump people when their own support services were already under severe stress.
Now we have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, whose administration flew, on Florida taxpayers dime, two planes of Venezuelan migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Apparently, they were not flown out of Florida but the flights actually originated in Texas. Massachusetts of course is currently a Democratic-run state. DeSantis said that Florida — not a sanctuary state — was sending migrants to Democrat-led states in response to their previous “virtue signaling” by declaring themselves sanctuary jurisdictions during former President Donald Trump’s years in office. Around the same time, roughly 100 migrants aboard two buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, were dropped off in Washington, D.C.
However, what about the impact on those migrants? No one expected to land in Martha’s Vineyard, having reportedly been told they were going to Boston. There is even some suggestion that, if the migrants were lured on to the plane under false pretences then it could have been illegal to do so. Imagine, landing on a small offshore island with a population of about 20,000 people, an island accessible only by air and sea. Obviously, the local authorities had few resources to care for these migrants. As a result, Massachusetts authorities had to move the migrants voluntarily from Martha’s Vineyard to a military base in Cape Cod so they could find shelter and chart their next steps. President Joe Biden responded, and rightly so, that the administration has a process in place to accommodate migrants at the border and Republicans shouldn’t interfere with such obvious “political stunts.” The President further stated that “Republicans are playing politics with human beings, using them as props. What they’re doing is simply wrong.”
As in Canada, any influx of migrants is covered under federal laws and the federal jurisdiction should be responsible for enforcing those laws. Canadian federal authorities are expected to coordinate settlement programs with the provinces, often funded by the federal government, that are designed to accommodate the arrival of and application by migrants or refugees as part of the process used to facilitate their landed status. This process was used to deal with a significant number of migrants who entered Canada from the U.S. during the Trump administration, fearing their deportation in the U.S. back to their countries of origin at the time.
But what of the extreme confusion, disorientation and trepidation that such migrants must feel when they are suddenly transported to other jurisdictions without due process under the law or a clear awareness of the circumstances. In the case of those Venezuelan migrants who had endured harsh and dangerous conditions to arrive in the U.S., one can only imagine how the Congressional Hispanic Caucus reacted. Just as past inappropriate interjurisdictional policies were condemned in Canada, so must Americans condemn these inhumane policies which leave localities scrambling to secure resources in support of the normal needs of human beings. I must say that I’m not surprised that Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott stooped so low as to implement such inhumane policies in order to gain some sort of political brownie points. After all, we’re not dealing with garbage here!
FROLITICKS 