RUTHFULLY YOURS

When 51 migrants died in an overheated box truck that was abandoned on Quintana Road, outside San Antonio, in late June, that got some serious news coverage. The Pope tweeted about it. It made section A, page 1 of the New York Times, though it was still below the fold, beneath stories on the failure of U.S. sanctions to stop the war in Ukraine, the legal cases resulting from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, and another Supreme Court decision that allowed high-school football coaches to pray on school land.

By the next day, however, the January 6 hearings took up the Times’ entire front-page headline, and more stories about how women are suffering after Dobbs got second billing. The 51 dead migrants in a truck merited one sentence at the very bottom of the page — turn to A13, where you can also find stories on Serena Williams and a Bret Stephens opinion piece. Ho-hum.

All in all, the San Antonio tragedy got roughly equal news coverage with the 50 migrants flown by Republican governors to Martha’s Vineyard last week: The latter got one above-the-fold Times story on Friday, with many follow-ups in the days since. But unlike the San Antonio case, the Martha’s Vineyard kerfuffle has also aroused the Times opinion page, which is filling up with takes on the Republican governors’ “stunt.” Republicans are mean, they say, and their ploy failed, because the people of Martha’s Vineyard rallied by giving canned goods to the migrants — before the National Guard swiftly exfiltrated every single migrant off the island and onto a base.

Frankly, I think the stunt rather proved the point. When migrants arrive at Martha’s Vineyard, the rich liberals there can be crowned humanitarians for not deliberately starving them to death in the few minutes before the military whisks them away. Yet the very complaint that the Biden administration’s negligent border enforcement, inviting rhetoric, and contradictory executive orders are enticing thousands of people to live under a highway overpass in the Texas heat is considered racist. Violent encampments are for red states; blue states have the military to take care of their problems.

Many of the migrants interviewed by television reporters thanked Florida governor Ron DeSantis for sending them to Martha’s Vineyard. And why not? It’s far more comfortable than the camp sites near San Antonio or Del Rio. It has been alleged that DeSantis or his underlings may have fundamentally misled some of the migrants into boarding the flight. If that’s true, they need to be called onto the carpet for it; we shouldn’t use desperate people as political pawns.

But just who is using whom here? The Republican governors know what’s really going to happen to those migrants. The Democratic mayor of El Paso, who has been flying migrants elsewhere just like the Republican governors and claiming reimbursement from the feds for his trouble, knows what’s going to happen to them. The Biden administration, which flies migrants around the country all the time now, knows what’s going to happen to them, too: Few if any of them are going to show up for their asylum-court dates, and almost every one of them is going to get a job in a lightly regulated or unregulated service industry.

Illegal immigration is allowed to happen because it makes upper-middle-class Americans feel richer, despite the fact that they work in fields that haven’t seen much in the way of productivity gains for several decades. Our pattern of negligence at the border is a way of creating an enormous labor pool in the United States, one that largely operates without the protection of the post–New Deal welfare state as we know it.

Try going house to house on Martha’s Vineyard and examining the difference between residents’ Venmo accounts and the 1099s they file with the government. The discrepancies you’d find would paint the real picture of illegal immigration in this country, and it wouldn’t look much like the one painted by the Times.

The temporary embarrassment of Martha’s Vineyard was the easy thing to endure; the real costs — the costs necessary for our upper-middle class to feel a little more like the old-money bluebloods of lore — are paid by the people sweating it out, and occasionally dying, in box trucks outside San Antonio.