Immigrants

“We have talked to a number of people who’ve asked, ‘Where am I?’ And then I was trying to explain where Martha’s Vineyard is,” said befuddled Edgartown, Massachusetts, police chief Bruce McNamee of the 50 illegal immigrants who landed on two charter flights at the island's only airport on Wednesday. According to local reports, the airport officials believed the planes were delivering corporate guys on a late-season golf retreat, before suffering the crushing disappointment that the arriving passengers were, in fact, poor people of color. The illegals arrived courtesy of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who sent them there using a $12 million budget set aside by our free state’s legislature to transport illegals to sanctuary jurisdictions.

More mischief this week from Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor along with his Texas counterpart Greg Abbott have been busing illegal immigrants to blue states that have declared themselves sanctuaries for migrants. Last night, DeSantis escalated this strategy by flying dozens of Venezuelans to the posh and isolated Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard, home to the Obamas. Now, the GOP guvs have kicked it up another notch. Cockburn hears that two buses of immigrants have arrived at the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, home to Vice President Kamala Harris. The result has been a scene of chaos on the residence's lawn as migrants disembarked and journalists showed up to film the spectacle.

Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

When will our intellectual life return to normal, where facts come together into conclusions? Today, in service to ideologies like Critical Race Theory, conclusions are established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support them. You can't argue intellectually against something so profoundly nonintellectual but you can take note of it in hopes that someday we will untangle ourselves. That's why today we're paying a visit to the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. When I joined the Museum as an educator in early 2016, it was a small, elegant, good place. Inside a restored 19th-century tenement apartment house, it told the story of some of the actual all-immigrant families who had lived there, from inside their actual apartments.