Originally published at: Attempting to create a media circus, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott actually helps some migrants | Boing Boing
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The only thing Abbott’s gambit has achieved so far is helping migrants with little cash to spare reach a city that has the resources to welcome them with food, shelter, assistance with paperwork and arrangements to help the migrants get to their final destination within the U.S.
To be clear, Texas as a whole has those resources too, and then some. Abbott and his fellow death-cult sado-populists have made a conscious decision not to use them, and instead divert funds to cronies and guard labour. That’s what this stupid stunt really demonstrated.
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I live here. Texas has always been a cesspool of racism and cronyism. We are so nasty that few survivors of our pogroms and rights revocations are able to give an account of what happened. There have been brave souls who have told their stories, but the TEXAS myth is too big and stupid to react in any thoughtful way. Finally some of the true horribleness is coming to light, but my fellow Texans either don’t care, or their voting rights are so trampled that making a difference on election day is nigh impossible. The U.S. should let us secede and choke on our own idiocy. It turns out we spend far more federal money than we pay in taxes. We are a welfare state acting like self-made millionaires.
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Texas wasted $4 billion on their recent operation to search trucks at the border. They found 0 immigrants and 0 drugs. They cost the entire country another $9 billion in GDP lost and drove up food prices even further. So, this result is par for the course. A font of wisdom Abbott is not, but the GOP is nothing if not captive to the ideologues, racist nationalists, and other groups who wrap themselves in a flag as they dismantle democracy.
EDIT: per comment below, I changed “illegals” to “immigrants” because yep, they’re right to point that out.
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At least they didn’t try to send them to Rwanda… 
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to be fair, no one is illegal… so even if they’d found some unreported asylum seekers, someone with an expired visa, or even the much more rare case of someone with no papers at all - that number would still have been zero
everything else you say is spot on though
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Good and fair point is good and fair. Thanks for the reminder and correction.
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I mean, can we do this kind of jiu jitsu in other areas? Keep sending migrants (and the industries that might rely on their labor) to states that will welcome them. We’ll take your gay and trans kids too, who will grow up to better adjusted citizens that those that shunned them elsewhere. We can take all the authors that aren’t interested in their books being banned and the musicians that won’t self-censor their art. Once all the buses unload where I live, it sounds like we’re going to have a pretty vibrant inclusive community, and Texas will be just as Texas as it was before.
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sure, but there is a small hang-up to this “just relocate the immigrants/BIPOC/LGBTQ/Other Libs to welcoming “blue” areas” and that is (just an example - myself) I like it here! i want to live in Florida, on the ocean where the weather, scenery and activities suit me. i (for one) don’t want to move to New York, California or (back) to the PNW - or for tha matter, any other liberal safe zone. i want to make my home safe and welcoming to those same people you would ship out.
no thank you. there is plenty worth fighting for (even in Texass, FFS!) that i would stay to see it through.
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I started to say that “by accident” is the only way Republicans every help anyone else, but then I realized “in a transactional manner” is also valid.
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The moment I heard about the plan, I thought “getting them out of his jurisdiction and as far away from Texas as possible is probably the very best thing we could do for them.”
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Ugh. I have a trip to Texas soon, because my parents live there, and I am not looking forward to it. I love my parents to bits, but I grew up a proud Yankee from New Hampshire and Iowa, a Democrat and have spent my adult life in Germany. Texas just… ugh.
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No. Stop telling me and others down here, especially people who are being victimize that they just need to move. This is my country and all of ours country, and we will live where we damn well please. I’m sick of being told that we need to abandon where we want to be. No. That is not how this works.
And BTW, when Black people did that in the first half of the 20th century - THEY DID NOT ESCAPE RACISM. We fix the whole country to ensure we all can live in safety and security and freedom, or we give the whole country up to bigots, and go back to entire communities having to eek out safe spaces that are never fully safe. I for one am not willing to cede any grounds anywhere. They don’t get to dictate to any of us the kind of lives we live. We have just as much right to be free people as they do. Abandoning that means that none of us live in a free country anymore. YOU included.
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Ha! He sure showed the libs!
(keep doing it dude!)
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Ultimately we’re all forced to pay taxes to cover Abbott’s campaign headline quest when that money could have been used to invest in our communities here. It is shit.
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and @Mindysan33 too!
We should all strive to make our states better places to live for the people the “conservatives”, ultimately, want to murder. Unfuck the eugenists, white supremacists, and Christo-fascists that only focus their attention on making the US a shithole country.
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I’m pretty sure there’s a law against knowingly transporting undocumented migrants. So he’ll turn himself in, right?
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I’ll second that from up here in Amarillo.
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Since he’s not transferring them from the legal custody of one facility to the custody to another, shouldn’t his jurisdiction end at the state line?
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