The recent transport of a group of asylum-seeking Venezuelan refugees to Martha's Vineyard was such a miserable, mean-spirited, performative stunt on the part of Ron DeSantis. If it weren't business as usual for DeSantis, the stunt might beggar belief. God help us if this nasty, sadistic, fascist-adjacent bastard ever becomes president.
With luck, he'll be defeated in November, which should take a bit of wind out of his electoral sails. He's no doubt got some voter suppression and/or election overthrow scheme up his sleeve. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Which is not to say that our immigration system isn't a hot mess.
When my Irish great-grandparents got off the boat in the 1870's, I don't imagine there were much by way of immigration rules. Hop on in Cobh, County Cork. Hop off in Boston. Make your way to central Massachusetts. Have a bunch of American kids...
When my German grandparents (my toddler mother in tow) arrived at Ellis Island in the 1920's, things were different. There were rules in place. One pertained to how much money immigrants had to bring with them. Somehow, my grandfather got the info wrong and only had enough cash for one person. (He thought the rate was per family.) So my grandparents were separated - my grandfather to the men's dorm, my grandmother and mother to the area for women and children - until my grandfather's brother in Chicago raised the rest of the cash.
But even then, the system was a mess, mostly when it came to who got to come. Right about the time my grandparents were coming, there was a ban on Asian immigrants instituted.
And it's gotten messier as we go along.
There's no simple fix, but as I heard Beto O'Rourke say the other day, let's start by allowing farmers to easily acquire temporary work permits for the seasonal laborers they need; let's stop dicking around with the DACA kids and make them citizens; let's cut the red tape that takes asylum-seekers up to 6 years to have their cases heard.
If we had the political will, surely we can fix our broken system, which is apt to get worse as those fleeing global warming in equatorial countries start making their way here.
Anyway, DeSantis paying good money (covid funds?) to send 50 refugees (and an awaiting videographer) to Martha's Vineyard is pretty disgraceful.
As was hiring a procurer to lie those refugees, conning them to get on the plane with promises that there would be help waiting for them in Boston (not, note, Martha's Vineyard).
A number of the refugees were procured by a woman named Perla.
Some of the Venezuelans flown to Massachusetts told reporters the tall, blond, well-dressed woman with the white truck scouted for passengers outside a migrant shelter and in a fast-food restaurant, promising them immigration paperwork, jobs, and free housing if they’d agree to get on the planes. She even put them up in an airport hotel until there were enough of them to fill the flights. As everyone now knows, Perla was lying.
Just who is this Perla?
Is she a true believer, someone who hates immigrants, who hates brown people, to the degree that it's okay to add deception and cruelty to the mix of how immigrants should be treated?
Is she a dimwit who believes the people she's conning are actually going to be helped? (Among other tricks DeSantis was up to: giving people an elaborate brochure outlining all the benefits they were going to get if they got on the plane to Massachusetts.)
Is she a paid, Craigslist performer, like those Blacks for Trump who sit behind TFG at his demented, Nazi-adjacent rallies, in need of a gig, anything for a buck?
Or is she a latter day greifer? The greiferin - catchers - were German Jews who, during the war, turned in fellow-Jews who were trying to evade Gestapo capture in Berlin? The greiferin were saving their own skins, or protecting family. Maybe Perla's been threatened with deportation. Or maybe she's just a nasty, soulless person. A good match for Ron DeSantis. Maybe we'll see her on his staff if he runs for president in 2024. (Ugh!)
“We have strapped on the full armor of God,” DeSantis recently said, previewing for top donors his plan to send migrants to the Vineyard, according to The Washington Post.
Maybe it's just me, but if there is a God, I'm not entirely sure that it's his armor that DeSantis and his ilk are strapping on. Just saying...
Meanwhile, the Statue of Liberty's been lifting her lamp beside the golden door for nearly 150 years now. You'd think we could figure this out. And mark me down as someone who was happy that, when they showed up at Ellis Island, Jake and Magdalena Wolf, little Elisabeth in tow, weren't met by some lying POS like Perla.
Perfectly said. Despicable DeSantis.
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